My heart be still. The very end, the Ninja, made me laugh.
On the Southpark website today, while searching for a dimly remembered episode, I failed and received this encouragement
Color Me Flepia: Fujitsu Launches E-Reader
Thanks to Lisa Sonntag for pointing out Fujitsu’s launch of a color e-book reader. Pretty pricey.
“For those who don’t read Playboy for the articles, Fujitsu has an e-book for you. Dubbed the Flepia, the device is what the company calls the world’s first color e-book — it can display 260,000 colors. Quite a difference from Amazon.com’s Kindle black and white e-book, which retails for $359.
Various documents and images — from books, newspapers, magazines and the Internet — can be seen on an 8-inch touch screen in high definition — 768 x 1,014.
The Flepia goes on sale on April 20 — in Japan only — and will be available through Fujitsu Frontech’s online store. The price tag? A whopping $1,000. Hmm, maybe things don’t look worse in black and white.”
Scenes from the recession – The Big Picture – Boston.com.
An amazingly depressing set of photos. Thx to Fester for the pointer.
This says it all for the state of the American newspaper.
via Think Ahead While Cutting Back: Marketing Priorities in a Recession : MarketingProfs Articles.
The Dour Marketer just caught a tweet from MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley pointing to this free piece by some smart people at MarketingNPV (disclosure, which has quoted me in a white paper penned by former colleague Rob O’Regan on marketing ROI in the past).
This is really good, n0-nonsense advice on how to cut when the mandate comes down from on high, and what not to cut during our current Depressionary pothole. There’s been a lot of this advice slung around recently, with rainbows-and-unicorns advice about “don’t stop the authentic conversation,” this sounds more like the real deal:
“First, get your head out of the emotional sand. You’ve lost the battle over the power of Marketing to drive the business in the near term. Don’t let disappointment cloud your future. Suck it up, look ahead, and don’t take it personally.
Second, take a step back and define the objectives for making smart cuts:
- Achieve the target reductions the CEO is asking for (most people stop right here).
- Support the company strategy for competing successfully.
- Conduct a thorough and unbiased analysis of all options.
- Preserve your credibility. Live to fight again another day.”
Take the recent announcement of the Kindle 2 by Amazon, last holiday’s shortages of the first generation device following Oprah’s endorsement; mix in Google’s immense effort to digitize the world’s library of copyright-expired books; throw in a ton of OEM interest in eInk and other e-reader screen technologies; blend in a bad economy and the simple math that e-books are half the price of their tree-killing, backpack straining ancestors; add a little something called the iPhone and an Amazon app that makes Kindle format books readable on that hip little device; bless with a patent infringement lawsuit by Discovery Channel over some copy projection system in the Kindle; now see Sony do a deal with Google to make half a million free books available to owners of Sony’s stylish reader ….
I’m not going to write the paper book’s obituary, but it feels like, as one writer put it yesterday, e-readers/e-books/whatever-you-call-em are poised to become the iPod of the literary world very soon.
It feels like a classic format/standards war is about to break out. Sony is the master of dumb moves when it comes to copy protection and file formats. Anyone who bought one of their post-Walkman music players knows they had an approach to DRM that was right out from behind the Iron Curtain – what one would expect from a content company that also makes devices. Amazon, who gets credit in music for pushing DRM-free tunes before Apple did the same, is not a veteran of the format wars. You want someone who has gone to the mat at Microsoft, Adobe, etc. when you arrive at a file-format fight. Google knows formats and open systems better than anybody, so my perfect world would be this:
Colleague Craig Merrigan, VP of Consumer Marketing at Lenovo, has lit up a WordPress blog. This guy is interesting for a couple reasons. First, he has that classic consumer packaged goods background (Quaker Oats) that is tantamount to being a paratrooper in marketing circles (P&G, etc.). Second, he is one of the biggest risk takers I’ve met in any industry, and was, on several occasions, a partner in crime on some interesting ideas — some of which saw the light of days, others which died a deserved death.
Craig is an interesting guy. Has a Japanese garden in his Chapel Hill backyard. Get him going on competitive rope jumping and watch what happens.
CapeCodTimes.com – Citations for dune sex drop in ’08.
Cmon people. You’re slacking off. We’ve got to make our quota.
via Friendship – Clam rake tussle leads to charges – Government – VillageSoup.
Nothing like a clam rake fight to start off the spring clamming season. Here in Barnstable the KlamKops pack guns. Now I know why. Up in Friendship, Maine…..:
“Around 1 p.m. on March 7, Shellfish Warden Neil Pollis saw two men digging clams off Cushing Road. He approached the men to issue a shellfish violation for digging without a license.
The two men became agitated and a 17-year-old male circled Pollis with a clam rake, while Jason Olsen, 24, of Friendship threatened Pollis with a clam rake. Olsen and Pollis got into a struggle and during the altercation Pollis was hit with the clam rake, according to Knox County Sheriff’s Deputy John Palmer. Pollis, who said he received some puncture wounds on the arm, was not seriously injured and was not transported to the hospital.
Pollis also had issued Olsen a violation about a week prior to the incident, he said. In addition, he had warned him on shellfish violations on other occasions.”
Tip o’ the hat to Cousin Tom in Damariscotta for the clip.