New Product Idea

Electronic business cards. Now, now I know what you are thinking. We've seen those before and they are silly. But I am not talking about the mini screened put flash video on a display kinda card. It's more inspired by the post that Mark Evans had a while back on "long live the paper business card".

Ok enough confusing prelude. Here's the idea. A paper like looking business card with only one thing on it, a url, that can actually hyperlink to the web if a mouse is put on it.

Eric our hyper smart programmer looked at me quizzically when I suggested this to him. At first i think he was thinking, “you have no idea the way the Web works lady do you?” and on second hand he took a moment, sat back in his chair and said, "hum, i am sure we could figure out a way to do that with blue tooth and a button you could push that would open the Web browser to the url." That's what I like! Little problem solution....sure beats the mocking....;)

Keeping Up With The Jones - Social Networking Style

Chris Kang the executive director of Schools Without Borders and I were having a discussion about his generation, the "Ys". Couple great insights came out of it for me.

Chris talked about a hyper Me2 syndrome that exists amongst his friends and said that myspaces really just was a "portal to hyper competitiveness".

Think about it. Now you are networked 24/7 with everyone you have ever met. You don't have to wait until your high school reunion to know they have just bought a house, got married on an island, got a great new job or won a million bucks.

You get to know one nano second at a time, how you rank vs. your 5000 closest friends.

Now that just takes keeping up with the Jones' to a whole new social networking level doesn’t it?

Peter's New Gig

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Creative Ad Spaces

Peter sent me a link to the cool hunter. Has some great ads on there (thus the name cool hunter). My favorite are the ads that try to make different use of outdoor spaces. I have long thought that in a cluttered commodity market place innovation will beat an expensive media buy any day of the week. Adidas proves it here in spades with their bridge wrap in Germany. Now tell me if you could ignore that Ad while you were driving!

Digital Media Climbs The Corporate Ladder

One way to measure the increasing importance of digital media within client organizations is to look at the levels of individuals involved in the process over time.

In the early days, it seemed that being on the online team was tantamount to being sent to corporate Siberia. How many times clients used the term 'skunk works' 'under the radar' I can barely count. From irrelevant, invisible and then integral, many of those same people silently went about their day attempting to change the way their companies did business.

Well, in the closet no more. Over the past past few years we have seen the level of client involvement increasing with CMO's more often than not being somewhat involved with the digital media strategies that they ignored in the past.

Anecdotally talking to many of my friends and colleagues in the digital media biz, there seems to be a significant shift happening particularly in the past year.

The pitch process, which usually was a small affair at best, (involving a small client team that would then take their best picks 'up the ladder' behind the scenes) is no more. CEOs of fortune 500 companies are now part of the pitch committee and leading their organizations digital efforts.

All demonstrating that fact that digital media has finally come of age and has made it to the summit of the corporate ladder.

Things Are Going To Get Bigger

It occurs to me as I struggle to read a document in 12 point type that the whole notion that everything will continue to get smaller and smaller and that we are going to have our life on our cell phone is a crock. It’s propaganda of a young industry with 24 year olds shaping the technology future. Only problem?

I am going blind. Everyone I know is going blind. We have been staring at a screen for the past twenty years and regardless of what we might want, our bodies are going to tell us to take a flyer. A friend who works with the CNIB told me that the stats are staggering for the acceleration of blindness in adults over 40.

The 16 point font or larger generation
The blurry generation
Generation blind

It’s just a matter of time.

Exposing The Deep Web

Defined:

"The deep web (or invisible web or hidden web) refers to World Wide Web content not part of the surface web indexed by search engines. Less commonly, the term deep web may represent deeper interaction."

The argument could be made that Technorati is a deep web search of sorts in the blog world and that could extend out to things like Eurekster the notion of social search as well.

From what I can gather, all the search engines that attempted to do this have failed. Anyone know of any still running? Would be fun to see the difference between a deep web search and a traditional google search.