You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2008.
In my line of work, I meet many young people, some of whom have never known dial-up. For them, having to wait a few seconds for a web page to load seems like “ages.” But as we speed things up, I have begun to sense people are actually slowing down, unable to cope with the torrent of data coming at them.
So the lure of a much faster internet, while it sounds wonderful, could rev up our lives more than we need, eliminating the need for quiet pauses, the “white space” in our thinking process. Getting past the ‘world wide wait’ is one thing. Being paralyzed by TMI and TMI (too much information, too many inputs) is another. A new word ‘exabyte’ is being tossed around. One Exabyte (EB) being one quintillion bytes. Never mind what quintillion means, it’s way too much!
In the UK, they are looking at “super-fast broadband” piped into homes through underground water pipes. Some years ago, Caltech developed a protocol called FAST –a geeky acronym for “Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)” Basically a new way of routing around congestion.
A warning cry is going out: “The exaflood is coming.” Maybe we should voluntarily slow down, before we are compelled to do it by other means.
There is some speculation about an ambush marketing tactic by Abercrombie and Fitch, placing people with their logo behind Barack Obama.
If they did, it’s a smart move. A&B said it was no more than a coincidence. The New York Post commenting on these ‘three mystery men’ with Abercrombie logos, note that campaign records reveal that an A&B employee has donated $500 to Obama’s campaign.
Nothing is too far fetched, with so much media attention given to the two Democrats. Let’s just hope Adidas shows up on the Clinton campaign with the “Impossible is nothing” slogan. Beats the generic “Yes we will!”
“He’s getting his ass kicked.”
Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, on the ‘credibility’ of Jeff Immelt, GE’s present CEO
“Nothing, nothing, nothing is as disgusting to me as some old CEO chirping away about how things aren’t as good under the new guy as they were under him.”
Jack Welch, on CNBC, making up for his previous criticism Jeff Immelt.
“Don’t pollute Earth Day with irrelevant advertising.”
Editorial in Advertising Age about marketers’ attempt to saturate the day with “Hey, look at us! We love trees” type of advertising.
“No happy label on toxic or wasteful product will ever change its contents.”
Abby Strauss, NY, a reader of Fast Company, commenting on Green Business practices article (“Another Inconvenient Truth“)
“Change everything…except for your wife and children.”
A 1993 quote attributed to Samsung chairman, Lee Kun Hee, to his chief executives. He now under government investigation.
“For the iced coffee drinks. Make them with ice cubes made from coffee.”
A consumer-generated idea on MyStarbucksIdea.com, that received 13,050 votes
“Phoenix is sprawling at a rate that seems to rival Moore’s Law.”
Matthew Power, in WIRED magazine in an extensive article (Peak Water) about ground water.
The concept of ‘paying it forward’ has been used in in various ways. Often it is a random act of kindness that someone does and it gets carried forward –or backward in this case.
So it is interesting to see it used as an expression of corporate culture, as we hear from Mallory Messina, an employee of Southwest Airlines, posting on the NutsaboutSouthwest blog. It involves paper towels in the restroom! Employees had noticed that paper towels were being left (dispensed) in restrooms, eliminating the need to touch the “germy lever.”
“every time I washed my hands in the ladies’ room, paper towels were magically waiting for me,” Ms. Messina noted.
She later discovered that this random act of towel dispensing had been happening in the men’s restroom as well. One more reason to fly Southwest: friendly folks + clean hands on deck.
Unlike rivers and dams, aquifers are not something we think about. After all, they are a few hundred feet below. But in Arizona, these constitute our back-up plans in the advent of a drought. They are also the intangible benefits of a desert state.
Unfortunately Arizona doesn’t market its water advantage enough. Water is framed as a crisis, rather than an asset because it’s the damn easiest thing to do. The media don’t help either, focusing on the problem not the solution.
This month WIRED magazine has an extensive feature called “Peak Water” by Matthew Power, covering the US, England and Australia. It leads with water management strategies in Arizona –Chandler in particular. “Thanks to this so-called recharge, the local aquifer is actually rising a few feet a year.” he says, illustrating it with a program between one of Intel’s fabrication plants (Fab 32) which uses 2 million gallons of water a day, and pumps back 1.5 million gallons a day into an aquifer six miles down the road.
Peak Water is a topic close to me, by virtue of where I work -at the Decision Theater. Among other ways of addressing issues through visualization, we have a sophisticated supply and demand model of water called WaterSim. We are also right next to DCDC which plans for these precious resources. I mean assets.
To some the aquifer is either half empty. To others the aquifer is half full.
In Arizona, what story do we like to tell?
Someday we will use our cell phone, I mean mobile device, as a portable hard drive, projector and remote control for a range of communication functions that are still add-ons, not core features. (How many people do you know who carry phones AND Blackberries?)
Until then we are all forced to email files to ourselves, so that these large attachments are floating around between Outlook and Gmail, and are easily accessible from a Mac at home, a PC at work, and a Windows Mobile phone in the airport, say. Damn devices!
So this service called SugarSync is a huge asset. It keeps files freshly updated for people on the run. Basically any file you work on, on one device, is automatically updated on the others. No version control headaches.
You could also create a folder (a “magic briefcase”) and drop any file or photo from one device to have it it accessible from the others.
For now, I use a variety of tools and services including the trusty flash drive, a wiki, a free online file storage service like DropBoks, and of course a shared drive. SugarSync will solve a lot of the runaround. Unfortunately it is not priced for everyone. At $2.49 a month for 10 gigabytes it is a good low-end solution. But if you are shuttling larger files like short videos, a folder of photographs for a presentation, and large documents –basically backing up most of the stuff on your laptop –you could easily be spending $100 a year.
Some employers might ask you to carry one of those small portable hard drives that cost $80 for 160 gigabytes, but it still won’t make every file accessible from your mobile device, and it will mean carrying around another piece of hardware.
“We’ve been waiting for the internet bubble to burst.”
Nick Denton, founder and publisher of Gawker Media, on selling off Wonkette a gossip blog, and two other blogs.
“The Internet, which is shorthand for ‘interconnected network’ …is often broken because applications don’t interact.”
Robert Scoble, in Fast Company
“SugarSync may be just as sweet as you like it.”
Stephen Wildstrom, Tech columnist in BusinessWeek, on a new service that keeps stores the most resent files on a server and synchronizes them with all devices.
“It’s a good idea to have a chief blogger.”
Mack Collier, social media consultant and blogger at Viral Garden, in a round table conversation hosted by Advertising Age.
“The drug industry appears to treat scientific data as if it were a marketing tool.”
Bruce Psaty, co-author of an article in the Journal of American Medical Association, on Merck & Co’s “studies” on Vioxx.
“Never use an agency to buy mobile media.”
Are Traasdahl, president-CEO of Thumbplay.
“They are being ignored by the Western media.”
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