Design

Big ideas, smaller audiences, and too many (or the wrong) metrics

Insights from the Conversational Marketing Summit

John Battelle's Conversational Marketing Summit, which debuted last fall with much acclaim in a more intimate setting in San Francisco, faced a challenging task with its second edition last week in New York.

For starters, the speaker lineup was impressive, but two of the most important players of the social media Web were noticeably absent: Facebook (which, to be fair, took part last year) and Twitter. Yes, where was Twitter, the epitome of online conversations? Or at least another micro-blogging service?

Additionally, and more crucially, the program had to deal with what business … Read more

What's in a (concocted) name?

I work for frog design, and frequently at conferences and parties, people ask me about the name: What does it mean? Where does it come from? While some suspect it symbolizes the agility of that animal species, the truth is that our German founder, Hartmut Esslinger, coined it as an acronym for "federal republic of germany" -- the lower case spelling of "frog" referencing the egalitarian tradition of Marxist semantics, back then in the 60s when frog was born.

Sam Birger, the founder of Nomenon, a renowned naming firm, whom I met in NY last week, … Read more

Is it time to get a new (refurbished) 1.0 iPhone?

With iPhone 2.0 coming soon, a question I've heard many a current iPhone owner wanting to get the next iPhone ask: what do I do with my old one? This emerging question highlights the early-adopter's plight against the law of diminishing returns. It's doubtful that a current iPhone will fetch more than $100 on eBay. But you never know. This presupposes that people will dump their old iPhones for a new one, but the incentives are there this time around especially with the lowered price, and given our disposable cell phone culture, it's more than … Read more

CNN prints headline T-shirts

CNN is now printing one-off American Apparel headline T-shirts. The new feature (in beta) allows you to order them from the CNN web site -- with the headline, time-stamp, and CNN logo on it.

Pretty cool. CNN gets it. Their T-shirt campaign exhibits all the key ingredients of contemporary marketing genius.

Instant: Merchandising in real-time, tangibly tied with world news.

Artificially scarce: The headlines are only available to be printed while the headline is in the current news section.

Customizable/hackable: The T-shirts are customizable. You can put your own headline on them simply by changing the text in the … Read more

From headphones to earbuds: quiet is the new loud

Rob Walker, the author of the just-released "Buying in," is a marketing connoisseur, an expert in reading the cultural underpinnings of commerce. In his Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine, he examines how technology shapes consumer culture and vice versa. In tomorrow's piece he elaborates on the history of headphones, and how their role evolved in modern society, from the first Bose set to the Sony Walkman to the iPod earbuds.

With the miniaturization of devices, the public exposure of personal space increased. I remember that when I was 14, I came home from school, … Read more

The social phone (wins)

In anticipation of the new iPhone release, Stuart Henshall has some interesting thoughts on " The Mobile Social World of Presence:"

"I've been thinking recently about my connectivity and mobility and one of the reasons I keep coming back to it is the dissonance I have when looking at the two mobiles I use most often. There's now been many comparisons made between the Nokia N95 and the iPhone. Both best in class so to speak. However, I've struggled to completely understand why the iPhone beats the N95 (for me and I'm also really … Read more

CNET Car Tech: A retrospective

Today being my last day at CNET, I was clearing out my desk and came across a stack of window stickers for all the cars I have reviewed and driven in the line of duty as an editor on the Car Tech channel. Rather than indulge in dewy-eyed reminiscence on my own, I thought I'd share a few of the highlights with you, the readers who have endured--and hopefully occasionally enjoyed--my automotive observations over the past two-and-a-bit years.

Starting with my review of the 2006 Buick Lucerne, I have been in and out of the driver's seats of … Read more

Featured Freeware: Blender

If you've ever thought about making professional-quality animations but decided not to because of the cost of the software, your excuse just got up and walked out the door. For Windows, Mac, and Linux, Blender is a free, open-source 3D rendering program that puts the power of the medium back into the hands of the artist.

Blender features a laundry list of animation essentials that can be broken down into categories: Interface, Modeling, Rigging, Rendering, Animation, UV Unwrapping, Shading, Physics and Particles, Imaging and Compositing, and Real Time 3D/Game Creation. The interface, though loaded with complicated tools, is … Read more

Mobile IM to surpass SMS?

A recent Gartner study estimates that 189 billion mobile messages have been sent by U.S. mobile-phone subscribers in 2007. It forecasts 301 billion mobile messages sent in 2008.

If correct, those figures would still account for only a small fraction of the 2.3 trillion messages to be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (a 19.6 percent increase from the 2007 total of 1.9 trillion messages). Asia is the biggest mobile-messaging market worldwide. China is in the lead, with approximately 560 billion SMS messages sent in 2007, followed by the Philippines' 430 billion and Japan's … Read more