Archive for the ‘Technology Events’ Category
Posted by Rob Ropars on July 15th, 2010
If you’re like me, you probably are working right now on a PC or Mac that doesn’t have a floppy disk drive. Some of you may be young enough to not even know what a floppy disk is (and there’s another gray hair). And to this day, I still don’t know why they were called “floppy” disks since they were firm plastic square-I guess the disc inside is sort of floppy if you pulled it out of the case.
Sony is the final company still manufacturing these 3.5” wonders of the early computer age. Recently, they announced that as of 2011 they would cease production. The prevalence of computers/laptops with massive hard drives, CD/DVD/Blu-ray writable drives, cheap external drives and “jump drives” essentially rendered these 1.44MB disks extinct.
Surprisingly, Sony has still been selling millions of them annually, but this little relic of technology is leaving our world for good. Just like rotary phones, film cameras and probably computer mice if Apple has its way with converting everyone to touching their screens to work. The floppy disk is about to become a museum piece.
It’s probably been a long time since someone preparing an email marketing message had to search through disks to find an image to insert into a message. For that matter, email marketing probably came into its own well after the peak of floppy drive usage.
But for those of us, who knew them and used them; let’s take a moment to say good-bye. Thanks for the memories.
Posted by Bill Leming on March 30th, 2009
Despite significant layoffs, budget cuts, hiring freezes, bonus cuts and all sorts of creative cost-containment measures, more and more clients from many diverse sectors are continuing to experience disappointing earnings. That, in turn, has unfortunately added fuel to even more layoffs; more pay cuts, more unpaid furloughs and fewer perks, not to mention the downward spiraling economic impact in almost all other areas of the economy.
During these first weeks of spring, with all the implications of re-birth and light-over-darkness, it seems appropriate to throw off this depressing mantel of winter and consider what, if any, positive lessons in marketing and, more specifically, email marketing we can take away.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in my post, a two-pronged focus each and every successful CMO I’ve ever met has; namely, how to prove day in and day out that you are generating significant incremental revenues, revenues that you otherwise would not have gotten while simultaneously maximizing efficiency. At the end of the day that’s really all that anyone really cares about. And truth be told people typically don’t care how you’re doing it (so long as it’s legal, ethical and doesn’t include words like derivatives, swaps or interest-only loans.)
Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 5th, 2009
It is interesting to see how today’s medium (especially social) can easily blow issues out of proportion. At one of this morning’s TED sessions, Bill Gates delivered an outstanding presentation on his foundation and the work they are doing to eradicate malaria. As an audience attention getting device, Gates brought along several mosquito traps (he only took one on stage with him). I sat two seats away from him and actually looked at the traps. I’m not sure about the one he had on stage, but the one that I looked at appeared to have one mosquito in it. I was a few feet from where it was released, and maybe saw one fly out of the trap.
The web and social networks lit up however. Headlines on websites popped up and Twitterers had a field day. Posts like this one on HeraldSun stated “Bill Gates ‘lets loose mosquito swarm’ at TED conference, “Bill Gates Terrifies TED Conference with Mosquitoes” “Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquito Swarm on TED Conference Attendees (and actually questions the legality of doing so),” “Bill Gates Released a lot of Bugs Yesterday.” It seems there is more focus on his cute audience attention gaining device than on the content of a really great message. In fact, the little stunt came back to haunt him in the form of a bit of a negative comment about Bill’s reputation for releasing buggy software, which he took in good humor and in stride.
If you really want to get to the deeper meaning of his message, go to read his excellent annual letter.
Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 4th, 2009
A couple of years ago at TED, we heard from a young grad student named Jeff Han. Jeff showed off a new technology. This technology showed off a new type of interface that anyone who watched the elections on CNN is now familiar with, but at the time no one had seen – the multi-touch. It’s on your I-phone and you are going to see it more and more places. Everyone that was in the audience knew that we were among the first to see a new technology that was going to take off.
Today we got to see another such technology. MIT Media Lab researcher Pattie Maes showed a technology that her team has been working on that allows us to integrate data with our other senses. The device that she showed us built from off the shelf parts (like a simple web cam) “sees,” and can search for information based on what it sees. For example, you can look at a book in a bookstore, and the devise will pull up an Amazon review and project it onto the book pages for you to read. If you see something you would like to take a picture of, you simply form your hands into a frame, the device “sees” it, and takes a picture of what you have in the frame. It can also project numbers onto your hand which then act as a keyboard for your cell phone.
My words can not do justice to this invention, but my sense is that you will see it soon enough – it is simply is a technology that has to make it out of the lab, and according to the inventor – will cost about the same as today’s cellphone. It is a bit bulky, but remember, it is a prototype.
Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 4th, 2009
Sir Tim Berners Lee shared at his TED session about how he developed the World Wide Web. He put it out as a memo, but nothing happened until 18 months later – his boss said he could do it on the side as a “play project.” Roughed up http, urls,etc. He did it because he was frustrated. Years later after his boss had died, they found the original memo with the following comment written on it “vague but exciting“.
The focus of his talk was on the importance of Linked Data – the more things you can link together the more valuable the data becomes. He indicated that today there are far too many silos of information. The power and benefit of linked data is fantastic and goes way beyond what he created when he created the web.
Berners Lee said in essence that data needs to be linked to be “freed.” Too much focus is placed on making a beautiful website for the data, but he states, “give us unadulterated RAW DATA NOW,” (and led the audience in a chant about this) so that the data can be used in many different ways.
This was a great presentation from a living legend.
