Month: October 2006

SpyCam is open for business

I now have a Lenovo USB “spy cam” perched on my monitor and am dying to start videoconferencing via Skype.

I am “davidchurbuck” if you want to give me a ping.

Richard Bissonnet, my buddy in Geneva, gave me a ring as sat here in the terminal at the Raleigh airport. This made for a most excellent torture test as I was connected via EVDO and had to scramble to plug in the camera, find some headphones, and start conferencing. And it worked. Richard sitting in his den drinking a glass of wine, me shouting over the terminal din to be heard. The microphone on the camera worked perfectly.

We need to hand out a thousand of these between Raleigh and Beijing and start doing some serious video communicating.

Connecting the Dots: Email? Direct mail? SEO? Free stuff?

Connecting the Dots: Email? Direct mail? SEO? Free stuff?

Thanks to Chris Murray for pointing me at this Steve Borsch post. Good stuff that goes into customer innovation, conversational marketing, and other on-the-fringe techniques. I like how his thinking about YouTube video/viral coincides with my own.

“There are no magic bullets. Most of these traditional (and even new) approaches are simply not working anymore. So what is, Borsch? What do you know that we don’t (and will you tell us)? I’ve certainly got some ideas but I do know that most methods of getting the attention of customers and prospects fail because most recipients are not interested, do not have a need, or already have what you’re trying to sell.

So let’s flip the problem around. Instead of figuring out how to find some sort of magic, efficient and more effective way to scream louder than your competition (or loud enough to be heard at all), instead let’s focus on ways to let your customers and prospects be heard and how you can give them what they need and help them buy.”

shot self in foot this afternoon

Tried to make my old RSS feed redirect through an .htaccess file and hosed the blog for an hour.

Will try again. Hearing from longtime readers who figured I gave up around the middle of September thanks to my brilliance in laundering the feeds through Feedburner.

Will try again later.

Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service – US Patent 7072849

Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service – US Patent 7072849

Yesterday I posted about IBM’s patent claims against Amazon. The New York Times mentioned IBM held the patent for online advertising. Here, from Patent Storm, is the abstract and full text. Stephen O’Grady at Redmonk is blogging about IBM’s patent stance.

“A method for presenting advertising in an interactive service provided on a computer network, the service featuring applications which include pre-created, interactive text/graphic sessions is described. The method features steps for presenting advertising concurrently with service applications at the user terminal configured as a reception system. In accordance with the method, the advertising is structured in a manner comparable to the service applications enabling the applications to be presented at a first portion of a display associated with the reception system and the advertising presented at a second portion. Further, steps are provided for storing and managing advertising at the user reception system so that advertising can be pre-fetched from the network and staged in anticipation of being called for presentation. This minimizes the potential for communication line interference between application and advertising traffic and makes the advertising available at the reception system so as not to delay presentation of the service applications…”

Taking Up Space On a Hard Drive

Taking Up Space On a Hard Drive

The smartest guy I know is blogging. He’s also shy, so I won’t drop his name, but if you ever want the smartest perspective on gadgetry, consumer electronics, and digital media — this is the guy.

“Marketers call me an early adopter. I own the first gen Newton, iPod, and Treo. My home currently sports a sonos system, hacked Tivos including a brand new Series 3 cable card model, and various flat screens including a Pioneer plasma that is already 4 years old. Nowhere to be found is either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, the new competing formats for 1080 lines of rich high def goodness.”

What Your Web Site Can Learn from Starbucks | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog

What Your Web Site Can Learn from Starbucks | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog

This is like a knife to the heart for me. Last weekend I treated a couple family members to my employee discount for new Thinkpads. Off we go to the website and one gives up and picks up the phone. “Dude, your website really sucks.”

We know. And we’re working like fiends to fix it. I won’t throw anyone under the bus, but it’s incredibly irritating to be the guy out on the sidewalk telling the sailors to come inside the bar, only to have the bar be dark, out of beer, and filled with other pissed off sailors.

“I want to buy a new laptop. I used to buy IBM ThinkPads and was really happy with them. Lenovo took over the ThinkPad range. Last year I went to the Lenovo site. I was a loyal customer. I wanted to buy from them. The Web site was awful. I went to a competitor.

“This year I read really great reviews of the ThinkPad T60 and X60. I go back to the Lenovo Ireland Web site. There’s a graphic on the homepage that has a picture of two laptops, with the heading: The power of 2 in 1. I click on the image. This site is sooooooo ssssssslow.

“Finally, I arrive at a page with the heading: “Lenovo care,” which has nothing to do with selling me a laptop. I want to buy from Lenovo, but this site is making it really hard for me.

“Starbucks knows–at a most senior management level–that in a convenience society, convenience is king. How long will it take other senior managers to realize that their sites have a direct impact on their organization’s performance?”

I’ll repeat my offer to anyone willing to pick up the phone. Call me. Email me. I will make your order happen.

Matt McAlister » Scaffolding web sites with Ruby on Rails

Matt McAlister » Scaffolding web sites with Ruby on Rails

Matt’s been messing with Rails and likes it. I’m jealous and need to get my geek side going. I like his proposal for a new acronym to replace LAMP with RASH.

“It’s mindblowing how much power this environment gives to people who aren’t true coders.”I have a feeling I’ll get stuck and frustrated with what I’m trying to build. But I’m very hopeful Ruby on Rails will get me closer than I could with open source PHP tools. If nothing else, I’ll get a sense for this new trend.

“Programming seems to have about a 3 year fashion cycle that also intersects with influxes of new ideas for web applications and a full cycle of students coming out of university. Now we’re at the early stages of a creative explosion on the Internet enabled by things like Rails, open APIs, storage solutions like S3, and JSON. And you can also wrap an idea in any number of different business models in even less time than it takes to build the product itself.

Maybe instead of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), we now have RASH (Rails, APIs, S3, Hosted).”

Globalize your blogspam — use fancy foreign words and watch it roll in

So, last spring, after Dave’s Excellent China Adventure, I blogged a couple times about China, China advertising, Chinese web design, etc.. I think, somewhere along the line, I may have quoted something in Chinese, putting, somewhere in my WordPress database, a few Mandarin characters.

And all of a sudden, in my pre-Akismet spam filtering days, I was playing whack-a-mole to 100 pieces of China blog spam in my comments every day.

Last week I blogged about Paolo Bettini, the world champion cyclist and winner of the Athens gold medal and instead of referring to Lake Lugano, I tried to show off my utter lack of command of any language by referring to that body of water as Lago Lugano. I think I also referred to Mr. Bettini by his nickname, “Il Grillo” or “the cricket.”

Lo and behold, the past 48 hours have been spent croaking Italian spam. Like this one:

“informazioni persona avviso informazioni linea modalitã pagina informazioni azienda nord est

informazioni persona avviso informazioni linea modalitã pagina informazioni azienda nord est”

Such a pretty language, such a shame to croak it. Anyway …. next I will post in Cyrillic and see if I can get some Russian fun going. The ingenuity of the spam crowd is impressive, and the machinma poetry they are producing to cut through Bayesian filters is, at times, pure art.

EVDO is Essential

The ability to connect whenever and wherever without ponying up $7 to the wireless bandits has transformed my productivity on the road. Using the built-in EVDO antenna in my Lenovo X60s, I can get online at 3G speeds through Verizon’s EVDO in about 30 seconds.

30 seconds if the client software works. Not to slag Verizon, but their client is the buggiest thing on my notebook. It insists on displaying a perpetual error message (Error 907), the client sometimes recognizes the radio, sometimes it doesn’t, and more often than not requires a full reboot.

Other than that, it is very nice to blog in between flights on my way to Raleigh, switch off for takeoff, work offline in “island” mode in Notes, and then replicate right on arrival.