Category: marketing

dropping the 12th shoe

Apple marketing media

youTube player on iPhone
This was the 12th icon, missing so far.

While on wifi through connect via local internet connection the iPhone might be a cute little viewer. Much like the Sony PSP was back in the day: 480 x 272 is the resolution on Sony’s device, while it is 480 x 320 on the iPhone. Somewhat tragic, that the actual hardware path (internet->wifi->device) was already available on the PSP. Two year head start. Wasted. Well, they sold 10 million PSPs in the US.

The real innovation would have been GPS. I think that devices should be fucking aware where they are. I would like the next MacBook Pro have EVDO
built in. Including GPS support. I am sure there are ample applications one could think of, once devices are location aware. It takes only 2 floats to store this precisly. Without any compression applied it would take a mere 10GB to store my location since I was born. One record for each second that I was alive.

how stuff gets made

marketing technology

a Motherboard get’s produced

Being a child of the last century, and having built machines, that, well, actually build machines, I might have unusual high interest in things how actually get made. Looking at America in 2007 you might think that it needs is marketing and malls to provide people with ‘stuff’. But there is this little -often ugly- detail: ‘stuff’ needs to get made. And before that, it has to be engineered. Mostly elsewhere.

spam, human one

BlogsNow malware marketing

BlogsNow is back. The added spam detection seems to work. Since I never trust new code, especially not when I wrote it, I pay a bit more attention to which blogs get flaged as spam. Once they are flaged they are ignored. This shows the blogs that google had seen updates for in the last ten seconds. Good luck finding a legit one. There are in there. Somewhere.

Today I thought I had found another bug. Blogs like these: example example example example example example started showing up being spam. Although they are written by people. After looking into it I realized that these people participate in a ‘pay per post’ scheme: They get paid if they blog about something. Sandwich men. I decided to ban all those blogs. No matter if it’s a spam bot or a human being getting paid to write his/her own copy and flagging it all-so-PC with ‘paid post’: The effect is the same. Links from those sources can not be trusted. I am aware that I delete lots of mid range blogs with that. But then, I don’t care: There is no short supply in blogs. BlogsNow can afford to look for the pure ones. Interesting how spam-detection can be a good training ground for other, yet related, schemes.

the break up

M$ marketing

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

no comment on the ending. OK. Maybe just one: lol. Of all people why are those saying this? They are the worst offenders of what they critisize.

images

history marketing media politics

images of fast food: ads vs.reality

I would not be surprised if you would ask people what they just ate and showed them both pictures they would pick the one from the advertisement. Not the one from reality. The romans left their vast cities for centuries to people that had no clue how you could make such things. The Colosseum was actually a housing complex for most of the 2000 years it existed. Our civilisation will leave billions of silver discs with all sorts of ‘realities’. Like movies, TV shows and games. People might not be able to make new ones, but they sure will inhabit our cultural spaces. Fake or not: we don’t care today. We eat the burger from the billboard rather than the one in our mouth. Why should people care more in 200 years when realities might have deterioated even more.

Want fries with that?

bad sci fi

history marketing technology

Intel showing us some bad sci-fi:

The problem with bad sci-fi is the same problem that most bad things have: Lack of originality, inspiration and flawless execution. A year ago Intel, Microsoft and Samsung got very excited about UMPC. While the rest of world simple uttered ‘umpc!’ So it didn’t go anywhere. Nor will it ever. Intels new ultra mobile vision is as inspiring as Ariel

DVD sales

marketing media

Maybe there would be more DVD been sold when they would not be such a pain to be opened. Between those layers of plastic and the stupid mandatory copyright notice and some random preview, menu stuff it takes up to 3 minutes to get to what I want: Watch the thing. Time not well spend.

cingular sucks ass

economy marketing

Phone companies. Now they call Cingular AT&T. Whatever that means.
I realized that I picked the wrong minutes plan. Too high. Trying to change it.
Of course the web form get’s stuck when you try to submit your information.
The Cingular site is the worst orange thing I ever saw.
It will not help if they make it blue again, and call it at@t.
It should work, and it does not:
The autopay feature somehow stopped working. That’s the only
thing that it has to do: pay my bills. The card is right, still works, is still valid and covered.

greyfication

history linux malware marketing media


So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems.

That’s the NY Times being clueless about Botnets. Good that they write about it. As it is a problem.
Bad that they write so badly about it. The author seems to like ot cover his bases here. “Scattered reports”? God, there are scattered reports about Ant’s playing doom in mongolia. This is as covering. Not more. The reality is that 100% of all botnets are run on Windows machines. There are still no Viruses for OS X. There are MS Office infections that affect the OS X flavor of the product. But the Operating system has been save.

It’s as binary as that. Don’t get me wrong: Apple sucks in some areas. But their OS has had no real life virus infections. People seem to shy away from such binary truths. Easier to throw in a ‘scattered reports’ here and there. Pseudo Balance. It’s actually much more harmful than it seems: It leaves loopholes. It kills the truth: Somebody with an intention could quote now the New York Times that there have been Botnets on Linux and OS X. Which is a lie. Not true. The big question that needs a real answer is, if Vista can join the club of predomiantly safe operating systems or not. Unfortunately journalists will not help in finding this out.

The only real weapon against malware is the truth.
Too bad that the New York Times is too afraid to avoid it.

a corporate flash site that does not suck

confessions of a pixel pusher internet marketing media

ILM’s Pirates 2 show and tell

Usually VFX companies have a hard time telling the world about their work. Either they keep their ‘secrets close to their chest’ or they simply lack the skills to communicate well. Lately a certain diss-interest of the public can be added to the list: The fact that something is not real in a movie is not worth mentioning anymore. The bar is much, much higher now. And -of course- ILM in Pirates2 reached it big time with Davy Jones. Their site about the fx is surprisingly good, informative and fun.

While looking at the blogs that link to the ILM page I found this 80’s TV piece

at Visual FX blog.
I had no idea that Lasseter / Disney did try to make “Where the wild things are”.