Google Click-to-Play Video Ads

Google will be adding click-to-play video ads to its AdSense lineup which includes text, Flash and image ad formats. The video ads will be available to AdWords advertisers in the U.S., Canada and Japan for display on Google’s publisher network rather than its search results pages. Ads are sold on CPC or CPM basis. Campaigns can be site or keyword targeted to serve video ads on a specific site or on pages where content relates to your product or service. You can also geo-target your ads internationally, nationally or locally.

Google video ads are unique in that only a static image is visible. The video will not play unless the user clicks. The user can advance the video, pause, adjust volume or click through to the advertiser landing page.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/05/click-to-play-video-ads-for-adwords.html

Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer

3:40 PM 0 comments

A New Outlook on E-Mail Marketing

This is another email marketing tool that everyone should be aware of, its called PoliteMail and it's a software download that provides an administrator all the tools to send email blasts through Outlook.

This software doesn't have the advanced capabilities of Blue Hornet, Silverpop or other big dogs in the email marketing space but provides the basics for companies on a small budget, such as:

- Built-in CAN-SPAM compliance tools
- Basic segmentation
- Provides customizable HTML template formats
- Standard email analytics: open & click through rates

Posted by Megan Riley

10:22 AM 0 comments

MySpace seeks link with Google or Microsoft

"Such deals typically involve the two sides splitting advertising revenues, with the lion’s share going to the website that delivered the audience."

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b2f9a994-e9e0-11da-a33b-0000779e2340.html

Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer

5:05 PM 0 comments

77% of U.S. Adults Now Online (Harris Interactive)

The number of U.S. Internet users increased 5.5 percent from April 2005 to April 2006, amounting to 172 million American adults currently online.

Percentages of American adults online have increased as follows:

74% in 2005
66% in 2002
64% in 2001
57% in 2000

eMarketer predicts continued strong growth through 2010 in overall numbers and in proportion to non-users.

Demographics: While the proportion of Internet users is skewed toward a younger, affluent demographic, 8% of the online population is over 65, 39% did not go to college and 14% have incomes below $25,000/year.

Marketing opportunities abound for almost any type of product or service.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003990

Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer

1:40 PM 0 comments

Google Moves Up to 50% of U.S. Searches

In April, Google share of U.S. searches went up from 47% in 2005 to 50% in 2006. Yahoo! and MSN remain relatively stable as shown below in a chart showing U.S. search share.

http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_060525.pdf

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=873

Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer

10:49 AM 0 comments

Nikon, Kate Moss and Flickr

So I was watching a movie at the theatre a couple of weeks back and all of the sudden, the screen was invaded by a gigantic nude (well covered in all the right places…or I guess wrong depending on who you’re talking to) Kate Moss. I was engaged but only out of curiosity. What could she be promoting? Soon enough, a close-up of the new Nikon Cool Pix S6 came on screen. What an interesting spokesperson choice, I thought to myself, especially in light of all the negative publicity recently surrounding Kate. But then again, sex sells and it sells well.

As the interactive branch of this campaign, Nikon created a micro site (http://stunningnikon.com) where you can play with the camera’s features, learn more about the product and most importantly, see more pictures of Kate.

To take this edgy campaign a step further, Nikon partnered with Web 2.0 darling, Flickr to create another micro site where Flickr members can upload and share their own photos, and even have links back to their own Flickr pages at http://nikonstunninggallery.com. Flickr is even exclusively promoting the micro site on their home page (http://flickr.com). Personally, I think it may have been more effective to just combine the two efforts instead of making people bounce around from one micro site to another.

Nikon, Kate Moss and Flickr. The three of them together seem to make for interesting bedfellows for a marketing campaign but it all makes sense in the end. Nikon gets to sell more cameras, Kate Moss gets to endorse a product other than cocaine and Flickr users can share their photography with a whole new audience. Everyone wins.

Posted by sandra

11:44 AM 0 comments

The Nobel Field

The Nobel Peace Center now includes an interactive space dedicated to the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. The room's glowing monitors, sound and lighting
respond to movement and create a completely immersive environment. Technology and design go hand in hand to create this beautiful installment. It could be worth the trip to Norway just to experience the impact of the room first hand.

"What is beautiful is that we're living in an information age and for me the fabulous thing is to dissolve the hardware and to make the software speak. Because thats what's precious, and thats what's delightful about the time we are in." -Architect David Adjaye

Click here to see more images or video clips from The Nobel Field.

Posted by Michelle Preston

1:00 PM 0 comments

eBay and Yahoo Join Forces

EBay and Yahoo released an announcement bomb early this morning saying that the two Internet giants have agreed to combine their efforts on a number of projects. By 2007, expect an increase in eBay search results on Yahoo!, an increase of contextual text and graphical ads on eBay, PayPal to power Yahoo! Wallet, a co-branded eBay Toolbar, and click-to-call advertising using Yahoo! Messenger with Voice and Skype.

... Yahoo!, Google, eBay, Microsoft... I can almost hear it, "everybody was kung fu fighting..."

Posted by Reid

9:36 AM 0 comments

Adobe Does del.icio.us

Adobe now has its own del.icio.us account(s) providing customers bookmarks to relevant product related Web sites. Just as interesting to me as the potential for this to become a top destination for finding links to Adobe related resource sites, and the customer outreach potential (i.e., marketing and brand) is the way that the bookmarks are organized.

Now, there are a number of ways to organize links in del.icio.us. Some people simply tag links. Some people organize links by category or "tag bundle" and then tag them. Adobe's going with one of my preferred schemes, the good old "Tag:Tag" scheme (e.g., InDesign:template) combined with the tag bundle. It's a nice way to keep things organized - otherwise, the number tags can quickly get out of control.

Check it out.

Posted by Charles

9:18 AM 0 comments

Treo-Video-Web-O-Licious

If you're into this kind of thing, at JumpCut.com one can rip, mix and burn their own videos with their own or other people's content. Forget about buying software or even shooting your own material. Just take what other people post and mix it all your own way.

Me? My favorite subject is the road. My favorite compadre? My wife. My other favorite subject and compadre is the Treo Smartphone I covet. If you look for videos on JumpCut that have been tagged Treo700 you come up with a little ditty I cooked up tonight combining mixing compadres with the road. I shot the video portions entirely on the Treo and mixed the whole dern thing on the web.

Why? Why not. I figure its a good way to preserve the memory. I can send the link to my family and they can enjoy our daytripper vicariously. Plus, JumpCut just makes it too easy not to try. I imported some of the photos I took and posted earlier on flickr. Add a favorite mp3 to set the tone, et viola. Enjoy!

Posted by Kelly Abbott

1:56 AM 0 comments

the myspace phenomenon

We've had clients ask us recently about advertising on MySpace.com and there has been so much talk about the site recently that I thought I would address this as my very first RDI biz blog post.

If you haven't heard of MySpace.com yet, you probably haven't heard of a little blonde pop star named Britney Spears either since I’m assuming that your cave isn’t wired for TV or Internet access. So, for you cave-dwellers out there who aren’t in-the-know, MySpace.com is the most popular social networking site today with site traffic rivaling Internet giants Yahoo! and Google.

There has been some backlash recently against MySpace due to questionable user-generated content and negative publicity surrounding sexual predators who used the site to prey on young teenagers. But you can’t argue with numbers and 70+ million registered users (and growing) cannot be ignored.

So, how exactly can advertisers take advantage of MySpace’s incredible reach without repercussions on their brand’s image? The key for advertisers to unleash the true power of MySpace may lie in a strategy that Burger King and Dell have modeled recently. In a world where the number of friends you have defines who you are, Burger King and Dell have definitely established some street cred to users through their clever (and viral) MySpace pages. Burger King even offers free downloads of the popular show, 24 (Jack Bauer is my hero).

All of the sudden, you’re not the evil corporate advertiser. Now, you’re one of them. As the old saying goes, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”.

http://myspace.com/burgerking
http://myspace.com/dellditty

Posted by sandra

2:00 PM 0 comments

Google market share is up

Comscore April figures report that Google market share increased to 43.1 percent (up from 42.7 percent in March). Yahoo! was unchanged at 28 percent, and MSN dropped from 13.2 to 12.9 percent.

Google's overall search share is up 6.6 percent from April 2005 to April 2006, while Yahoo fell 2.7 percent and MSN fell 3.2 percent.

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=43637&Nid=20483&p=340003

Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer

3:53 PM 0 comments

Rough Cuts: Read Books in Progress

Rough Cuts is a service from Safari Books Online that allows you to read books while they are being written. More relevant for books of a technical nature, which tend to become outdated quickly, book publishers can once again compete with blogs and other information-focused Web sites as expert sources on the latest technologies and trends.

Why do I like Rough Cuts?

1. Up-to-date perspective and thorough topic analysis by subject matter experts in book format.
2. Cost savings - you have an option of purchasing a book in PDF format (less expensive), or both a PDF and printed copy after the book is published (more expensive).
3. Collective intelligence - readers can provide an author feedback of a work in progress.

My first Rough Cuts purchase is an book by Dan Staffer, an Interaction Designer at Adaptive Path, titled Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices. So far, the book has been great, and the overall Rough Cuts service has been pretty good too. Hopefully, Rough Cuts will send me an email update when new versions of the book are available for download.

Also, on the Interaction Design front, San Diego's User Experience Special Interest Group (UX SIG) is meeting tonight to review new features and functionality soon to be rolled-out by Proflowers.com. For detailed event information, check out the Eventful listing.

Posted by Charles

1:30 PM 1 comments

Alice and The Analog Hole

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? - Alice

Of the many ways your personal security can be breached, none is as common or as easy to prevent as the analog hole.

I was standing in line a few months ago at the Zoo with my niece and Stephanie waiting to get on the zoofari bus tour when the gentleman in front opened his analog hole way too wide. Making use of the idle time - as many of us are wont to do - he decided to make reservations for dinner that night form his mobile phone. The reservations, it seemed, required that he give his name, phone number, credit card number and expiration date. At that very same moment, I was typing a text message on my smart phone and felt as if people around me were thinking that I was stealing his identity. Not that I was, or that I could have, but probably because they had the same thought that I did. "Is this guy seriously saying these things out loud in front of hundreds of total strangers?"

Last weekend, at our office outing at Basic, I was asked by Josh - Rebecca's husband - who was was in the middle of taking the CIA exam (an accounting certification) to comment on a question the exam posed about who poses the greatest security threat to any given organization. He was worried about hackers (which is a common, and valid fear) but I was more worried about employees. I figured, the people with the easiest access to the data would go relatively un-noticed with copies of the data. Whereas cyber-based attacks can be thwarted with many layers of firewalling, locks, keys, passwords, secured sockets - what's to prevent your intern from writing down names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card details while entering customer data?

Then there's another place to lose yourself: you. That is, your own online presence can be surprisingly revealing. Twice this weekend I listened intently as friends of mine explained how they had recently found myspace accounts for people they know. One - a now ex-babysitter - whose myspace account was innocuous, but her boyfriend's account was not. The second - a senior VP at a large media company in LA - whose MySpace account had a link to his website which showed him in various compromising poses. In both cases, the analog hole was left wide open because those two people left traces of their personal lives in public. Not smart.

That's where iKarma and Linkedin come into play. At both these sites one creates an authorized version of oneself for the world to find and connect with.

Here's my linkedin account. Here's my iKarma account. Both have links to my work self (you're reading it now), my personal blog, and the Stephanie and Kelly wedding site. While all three of my sites specific audiences in mind, anyone doing their research on Kelly Abbott will get a healthy dose of text, photos, videos I wish to make public as well as those that others make public about me. One hopes that people researching me know the difference between this Kelly Abbott and this one. If they don't then I at least have good iKarma.

Here's some recent articles to read:
Device to combat 'shoulder surfing'
Vet theft data (bits stolen when atoms accidentally picked up in unrelated burglary).
John Udell's article on the entertainment industry's efforts to plug the analog hole on information users really do want to share.
iKarma in the news.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

12:22 PM 0 comments

BeneTrac.com Re-launch

Benetrac has been a client of ours since the beginning. They've always been a supporter and we like to think it's because we've produced quality work for them.

Check out their newly redesigned site, drop us a line and tell us what you think.

Some highlights:

• Tableless, Valid XHTML


• ROI Calculator


• Carrier list HTML, PDF and Email formats (all one datasource)


• Sales inquiry email form


• Online demo


• "Features slideshow" with scrolling forward-back functionality


• Case studies and customer testimonials.


• RDI Press Center module (CMS for your Newsroom)


• Re-organized site architecture and UI to lead users along an effortless clickstream


• Bite-sized easy-to-digest copy (fortified with vitamin RDI)

Enjoy!

Posted by Kelly Abbott

10:25 AM 0 comments

The Future of the Internet: Yahoo's Big Bets for the Next 5 Years

This is a pdf link to a slide-show used in Yahoo's recent Analyst's day last week. There is some GREAT information in this presentation regarding where they see the Internet heading... in addition to some interesting analysis on their role within that future.

Posted by damo

1:37 PM 0 comments

Marketers: Holding Companies Awful at Integrated Marketing - MarketingVOX

Posted by Reid

11:38 AM 0 comments

May Flowers

The Web 2.0 rose is sprouting up everywhere. No, really, everywhere. It's an uncontrollable weed. It seems you can't make a click anymore without being reminded your in a read-write web of tech-crunchy, zen garden goodness. Ask IBM what they think of it, they'll tell you they invented it. They've been calling it middleware. Tamato, tomahto; potato, patahto; either way you say it, both are the lines that connect the dots. In a B2B world, AJAX is still the preferred method of cleaning the office park stalls - so merely connecting the dots is a big thing worthy of a big company's help. Ask the Web 2.0 crowd and they'll guffaw. It's a c2c thing; who's got the time-slash-money-slash-patience for IBM? That many dots getting connected is a middleware by another name. What shall we call it? Lifecasting? Is that where my garden starts and your vista begins? If so, let the Web 2.0 roses bloom.


(Click to enlarge.)

To illustrate matters, I made the above mind map using a tool called Mayomi, created by a fellow OSU-Grad, Christoph Helzle, who also happens to live in San Diego. Before today, I didn't know who he was, but I did know his creation. How his dots got traced back to mine are fodder for another story. What I wanted to show you was the graphic I created using his online mind-mapping tool which itself is oh-so-web-2.0.

What the graphic shows is the hierarchical relationship of elements influencing and influenced by your Internet presence - in a strictly web 2.0 context. And by you, I mean you. Not all of the above is applicable in a business context yet. I've commented on several occasions how Web 2.0 influence on the enterprise is a bottom-up phenomenon just like Wi-Fi was. The individuals in an organization are the ones who will be Web 2.0 savvy at home and insist that the organization they spend their waking serving start to adopt these simple principles as well. So what are those principles?

The mind-map shows how an individual's content can be dispersed over several places, syndicated, mashed-up, consumed on many different devices and contributed to by many different means. As an individual, who I am, for lack of a better term, is what I'm selling to others. For a business, the same is true. Your story, your goods, your information is the value you offer the stakeholders within and without your organization. Naturally, as individuals become more comfortable broadcasting who they are, businesses will too. It may take time; but it's certain to happen.

While we wait, see how RDI itself is getting a little more read-write-friendly, too. Today we republished our RSS feed, this time around powered by Feedburner. The feed is what sits in the center of the graphic above and for that matter the center of our Web presence. Since the feed is really the rawest connection with our data, it's the closest we can come to allowing you to consume the information that we are "selling." Over time, we'll find ways to disseminate information in more meaningful ways. I will be posting more about Web 2.0 in all its floral glory in the future. In the meantime, why not tune into our feed and let the flower grow?

Peace,
K

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:28 PM 0 comments

Big Daddy Info Released May 16th

I read Matt's blog a few days ago, then saw it was picked-up today by Search Day.

In a nutshell (and contrary to Search Day's link, I don't think Matt's info is any big SEO news): Matt Cutts, Google Engineer gone PR guy, blogged everything he knows about Big Daddy (Google's new crawler released back in December 2005). Needless to say, the algo-chasers are all over it; as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

If you like to read about search engine stuff, Matt's blog is a good place to start.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/

Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer

8:44 AM 0 comments

Triple Lindey: SandCHI Student Presentations

Several students from UCSD's Cognitive Science Program presented thesis projects to SandCHI last night delivering on a diverse range topics from effective retail store design to improved localization of mobile device user interfaces. Just as impressive as the real-world potential of these projects was how the students applied UCD principles to improve product design and innovate at the feature level. Clearly, these students have the skills that will complement any forward thinking design team. I've included a summary below of some of the points that I found to be interesting.

Touch Screen User Interfaces

• For people who can't type properly, and either don't have the time or don't want to learn, touch screens are a great solution.
• User interface components like sliders, combo boxes and date-pickers reduce typing requirements, and ensure consistency in the format of data input.
• Big buttons reduce selection errors - duh.

Retail Shopping Experiences (Physical vs. Web)

• In physical spaces, environmental factors like temperature, light and scent guide shoppers toward products and are major influencers of purchasing decisions.
• Also, in physical spaces, contextual product placement is becoming more popular. For example, it's now common to see ketchup, mustard, buns and dogs all displayed together. On the Web, contextual recommendations are taken to the next level including personal characteristics like browsing history as well as the collective intelligence and recommendations of other users in real time.
• RFID technology will soon change the way we shop in physical spaces alerting us when we are approaching an ingredient that we need for a recipe or if we've forgotten something before leaving the store.

Mobile Device User Interface Localization

• Indian culture prefers brighter colors and higher graphical density in displays.
• In rural areas, it's common for many people in India to share the same phone. Therefore, it would be useful if phones supported multiple user accounts for things like contacts, address books, etc.
• For people who don't understand a language, voice recognition and photo contacts are solutions that replace the need to read.

In addition to the student presentations, several interesting Web sites were mentioned because of unique services offered:

Scanr is a Web-based service that converts photos of whiteboards and documents into searchable PDF files.

Compare Yahoo! and Google Search Results

Also, Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs, is a book that you might want to read.

Posted by Charles

5:14 PM 0 comments

New milestone: one billion Internet users worldwide

The U.S. has the most people online with 175.4 million Internet users at end of 2005. China follows with 111 million.

Broadband continues to proliferate. eMarketer reports 108.1 million U. S. broadband users at year-end 2005. The forecast is 173.5 million U.S. broadband users by 2010.

While dial-up acecss is quickly replacing broadband, the U.S. trails other markets in broadband penetration.
At year-end 2005, over 40% of U.S. Internet households still used dial-up. This will decline to less than 15% by 2010.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003975

Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer

2:37 PM 0 comments

MetroNaps

MetroNaps

What an amazing concept! I can see how this will take off in big cities, especially Manhattan. I used to commute from NJ to NYC and it was so exciting when you came out of the tunnel and heard the sounds and experienced the energy of the city. It was invigorating and inspirational and it felt as though you were entering another world. After a while though, it does become the daily grind and there is definately a need for an 'escape'. For me, it was the commute whether by bus or train. How amazing it would have been to re-energize and escape the sounds and stress of the big city in a comfy POD!

I hope this takes off and we start to see them everywhere - even here, in the much more relaxed, mellow city of San Diego.

Posted by jeannie fratoni

10:58 AM 0 comments

Flickr goes Gamma

Flickr went Gamma at some point yesterday. New UI. Still the same old flickr. It was easy to begin with, but somehow they made it even easier to get around.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

4:04 PM 0 comments

Brand the Extending of

People are brand-loyal for items close to their person. Clothes, for example. It's hard to shop at The Gap if I'm comfy with Banana Republic. What's more, I'm twice as brand loyal for products I ingest. I'll never switch from Colgate to Crest. Never. Not in a million years. Why? Because I've grown accustomed to the taste of once not the other. I look for MY brand whenever I travel and forgot to pack the essentials - which seems to happen all the time.

Coffee. I cherish my coffee. I like Starbucks. You could even say I'm brand loyal. They're on every corner, convenient, and -- pardon the coffee parlor parlance -- their coffee doesn't suck. Not that I won't anywhere else, but I do enjoy the sight of a Starbucks in a far-off land. That's why their recent decision to be the main media outlet for the release of the film Akeelah and the Bee struck me as an odd, at first, extension of their brand. But then it also made sense.

Starbucks embraced the task like no media outlet would have. Traditional media seems mired in the world of insertions, reach and frequency, whereas Starbucks -- in order to make their media outlet more compelling -- is also willing to work harder to extend their brand into their would-be media-buyers' brand. So when it came down to it, the flash cards with elephantine words and mnemonic devices, travel scrabble sets, soundtracks and ubiquitous Akeelah-Starbucks Green throughout the store somehow fit. The constant reminder works in a way that my TiVo-wise attention span won't soon forget. I think -- and you lurking social psychologists out there may wish to chime in at this point -- I think I even felt compelled to see the movie expressly because Starbucks was going to such lengths to really bring the film into the brand, embracing the film and bringing it into the fold in a way that traditional media just cannot. Since I trust Starbucks to pour me a decent caffeinated beverage every morning, I also trust its taste on all things cultural. Music, movies, games and anything else that comes their way. They've got taste. And you know what? The movie didn't suck.

Yet, media buys in the unlikeliest of places is nothing new. Nor is brand extension. McDonald's and Disney have a familiar embrace. Speaking of Banana Republic, Stephanie just bought a Banana Republic dress that was made two Christmases ago during the holiday push to promote Memoirs of a Geisha. She bought it on eBay and the description was still "Memoirs of a Geisha Red Dress." While Banana didn't go quite as far to embrace Memoirs of a Geisha as Starbucks has done for the PBS Bob Dylan documentary or Akeelah and the Bee - it did find itself the beneficiary of supplemental income for being essentially a media outlet catering to a particular demographic that Dreamworks wished to reach with some frequency. Makes sense even to the mind of a media planner.

On the Web, Sony Pcitures is really getting their game on. This time with Google extending its brand and media might to a little blockbuster-to-be called the Da Vinci Code.


(Google dominates my desktop. Click on image to enlarge.)

A few weeks ago, Megan sent me the link to "The Da Vinci Code" Web site which was co-sponsored by Google (sadly the game site is no longer live). The site featured a normal film-promo site. Only when you scratched the surface there was a mystery awaiting. Where would you find the answers to the clue in the site's many mysteries? On the Web of course - preferably via Google search.

In the 20 days since the game site went live - where each new mystery is released each new day - I came to my Google home page (seen above) to pick up where I left off. Ingenious. A virtual scavenger hunt helps "The Da Vinci Code" extend its brand to Google and vice versa. Today, a word scramble; tomorrow , a symbol deciphered. Together the gimmick actually works. Megan and I weren't the only ones addicted to the format and we certainly will not be the only ones to see the film this weekend.

Posted by Kelly Abbott

2:14 PM 0 comments

The Four-Day Week Challenge

The more you work, the more you get done, right? Well, I’d like to encourage you to take the “Four-Day Challenge.”

The problem
If you’re like most people, you’ve got too much to do and not enough time to do it. The e-mail inbox is always overflowing and the list of to-dos never ends. You always feel that twinge of guilt because you’re never spending quite enough time on what you should be. What’s even more frustrating is that the more you work, the more it seems there is to do. Argh!

So how do we manage the madness?

Posted by damo

11:39 AM 0 comments

Snap – The other way to Search

Snap.com web application presents search results in two columns. The left side lists a familiar text summary of each site and the right side displays the actual web page corresponding to each entry. The user can simply scroll through the list using the up and down arrow keys, much like surfing the channels of a television to immediately see each search result. Try it out!

"Snap is a new search engine that offers a very different alternative to the Big Search, Text-In, Text-Out, method. Snap is visual. Snap is fast. Snap is Interactive."

Posted by Amanda Handriani

9:07 AM 0 comments

Yahoo Inc. Overhauls Home Page

yahoo! is hearing the footsteps that belong to myspace, google, aol...

Posted by brian_tsang

2:00 PM 0 comments

13276 Email Messages

Productivity has been a subject on my mind lately. The other day, a friend of mine asked me how many messages were in my inbox. I replied, 13276. He was floored by my response. I even have subfolders, but still there remains a large number of email in my inbox. He asked me if anything ever slips through the cracks and I let him know that I have a freakish talent for rarely forgetting things. But, imagine what I could do with that brainpower if I was not spending it on knowing where email is (or knowing exactly what's on my messy desk, for that matter)?

Instead of simply making fun of me, my friend offered an intersting solution. A blog post describing a method for oganizing email (as part of a larger topic of organization) here:
http://www.rkuo.com/blogs/rkuo_blog/archive/2006/04/15/86.aspx

I think I'll give it a try!

Posted by Ingrid Alongi

1:26 PM 0 comments

The Insider's Guide to Creativity in Business

Three creative roadblocks to avoid.

1. Knowledge is power. It can also slow you down.
By far, the principal block is knowing. When people have an answer, they tend to not look for better answers. Then there is fear of failure, fear of what others think, fear of success.

2. Go ahead, screw up.
Those who fear failure tend not to stick their necks out and, consequently, they don't succeed as much as those who don't fear failure so much. Babe Ruth struck out more than everybody else.

3. Good enough isn't.
You're trying to solve a problem. You come up with a good solution. Then you stop. The reason you don't come up with a great idea is because you had a good idea, so you stopped.

Read more about how men and women are different when it comes to creativity........

Posted by Anne McColl

12:03 PM 0 comments

Better by Design: The Rise of the Lifestyle Brand

"It takes a lifetime to become the child that you should be." Jean-Luc Godard, Film Director

Bringing that inner child to life is exactly where design and branding are heading. The fine lines between work and culture are merging, and lifestyle branding is the new trend for companies like Target, Diesel, and Adidas. By adding some fun, interactive marketing to a branding campaign, the 21st century consumer will be successfully reached.

"The love-marks of tomorrow are the brands that merge culture and commerce and employ creative design to bring playful ideas to life...The really clever ones will make it a strategic priority to add a little joy into their consumer's lives. So, think like a child, act like an adult now, not a lifetime too late."

Posted by Michelle Preston

11:04 AM 0 comments

Slow Thinking

Yes it’s now technologically possible to assemble and e-mail a concept in less than an hour, but the human brain’s timeline for brilliant ideas hasn’t changed.

We eat too fast. We work out too fast. We drive too fast. We play too fast. We read too fast. We even have sex too fast.

And we think too fast.

Some interesting ideas how to keep the creativity flowing.......

Posted by Anne McColl