In a mashup of cell phones and digital signage, TI has started showing its Pico Projector - a tiny digital projector built into a phone. Now if they could just build one into an iPhone...
This tech was first seen at last year's CES, but looks to be available next year.

Popular Science Blog - A Picture In Your Palm

Honda featured the band "Fall Out Boy" in a Google Gadget Ad, which contained several dozen videos of the band and could be added to nearly any website including iGoogle.

Google Gadget Ads

From the press release:
'Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google(TM) content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. They support both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, and offer a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale.'

"We're always looking for new ways to engage with our consumers," said John Vail, director, interactive marketing, Pepsi-Cola North America. "Google Gadget Ads allowed us to reach the right audience at the right time, with an interactive message that brought our light-hearted Sierra Mist campaign, ‘Squeeze More out of Summer,' to life."

PDF approval meets Xinet hosting - apparently Aprimo's got it working for 8.0. Comments are saved into the PDF, and also imported into the Aprimo database, all without using WebDAV.

Link

Advertising Age - Digital - Nokia Moves Closer to Being an Ad Seller

In addition to Nokia's interesting partnership with Adobe (they had their own spotlight time on stage at the Creative Suite conference, are rolling out millions of devices enabled with Flash Light in the next few years, and are all over Device Central) - now Nokia has the workings of a real content delivery network.

Note that consumers are likely to react very negatively to this unless the advertising is highly targeted - another reason to embrace more and more customization and personalization of content. Luckily, with Nokia driving, the relationship is already there - though I'm still not sure I'll appreciate getting SPAM from my phone company.

Virgin America have announced that "sometime next year" you'll be able to connect to the internet from their flights, using either your own device (laptop, PDA, etc.) or their seatback-screen based application.
More info here and here.

From Smashing Magazine.
Link

I could spend days here... is it sadly ironic to get lost in a page of maps?

Seriously, I do get a kick out of this stuff.
I was involved in the NYC Transit maps for many years - bus maps, subway map, neighborhood maps... and I also worked on some other systems, such as Washington Metro. What I dug most about it was that we were mapping something that didn't really exist. A bus route, in particular, is an agreement to drive in a certain pattern, not an actual thing. As such, you can't photograph it.
Even in the case of a subway, where the tracks are obviously laid out, the pattern of service changes throughout the day and throughout the week (some trains don't stop in certain places on certain days, for example).

Now, how do you map that? On paper, it's a real problem, involving complex symbologies that often baffle users. In the interactive world, we have motion and time and interactive selection to add to the arsenal, but that doesn't mean that the business of figuring out how to represent stuff that can't be seen directly is any the less challenging.
Edward Tufte has great insight into this, by the way - another world I could get lost in quite easily.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Well, if your customer can't find your product, website, offer, or other critical information about you, can you make a sale? I think not. And in the current environment of information overload, the danger of getting lost increases every second.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/28/45-excellent-blog-designs/

From Smashing magazine.
Overcoming the tendency to pick one of the included "styles" and actually design something...

Here's the only one built on Drupal:

http://abduzeedo.com/

On Guy Kawasaki's recommendation, I'm giving Mars Edit a whirl.
It's going to be hard for me to give up on Flock's right-click/blog-this approach, but in other ways Flock's a little klunky - and I don't need another browser!

In Micro Persuasion: The Geek Marketer, Steve Rubel asserts there's a new role to be filled by people who can
bridge the gap between the technical and the marketing world.

While in some ways this is not news, in practice corporate America has a long way to go in integrating these two disciplines.
i work for a huge advertising network (though my unit is on the small side) and I see IT going in one direction, marketing in another, and creative bouncing around somewhere in the middle. If we can begin to share and play together better than we've been doing, we can fight off the competitive threats (death of print, etc.) that have been so frightening.

Here's a complementary take on IT's role in innovation - this time from the technical side:
CIO.com: The Secrets of IT Innovation 

California senate votes to block mandatory RFID in employees - Engadget

There seems to be a bandwagon effect centered around RFID-as-destroyer-of-liberty.
Whatever the right and wrongs of this, and opportunistic politicians aside, it's something manufacturers and retailers need to be careful about.
Surveillance is certainly a hot-button topic, and "cool" and "convenient" can easily be trumped by "creepy" and "invasive".

More anti-RFID sentiment here:

http://www.spychips.com/

Blogged with Flock

Tags: RFID, technophobia