I doubt if many people are checking blogs on Christmas day, let alone writing them... Although there are a lot of very weird people out there, including me! But to all my loyal, regular, or even occasional readers... Many, many thanks for all your support and comments.
The great thing about the so-called "Blogosphere" is that you re-discover old friends and continue to make new ones. Anyway, enough bullshit. I wish you and yours, all the best for the holidays. I look forward to this journey getting even better next year. Cheers/George
no comments
Did you know that the fastest growing segment of the cell phone market is for phones that cost more than $8,000! For the ultra rich, a high-end cell phone means something quite different from what we probably use. They're plunking down thousands -- even millions -- for handsets loaded with gold, gems, and other over-the-top extras.
The biggest purveyor of cell-phone bling is Vertu, the British subsidiary of mobile phone giant Nokia, which makes phones costing from $6,500 to $72,500. Even the lower-priced models boast fine materials such as Italian leather and 18-carat gold, while top-of-the-line units are studded with hundreds of diamonds and other precious stones. And every phone has access to a concierge service that can help you, say, charter a private jet to the Bahamas.
And if you think phones this expensive comprise a mere fraction of the overall market... Think again. Vertu sells about 200,000 handsets a year at an average $8,000 each. That works out to a cool $1.6 billion, nearly 3 percent of Nokia's $58 billion revenues.
Last Sunday, there was a great article in the New York Times about the different approaches to "Cloud Computing" being taken by Google and Microsoft. Forget all the esoteric (but highly important) detail about how this is the way we will use most software applications in the future. The most eye opening thing about that article was how it spelled out the different ways that the two companies work.
Microsoft takes forever to wade through their top heavy layered structure (I know, I've worked on their account at several agencies... It's a nightmare.) Google does stuff in weeks if not days. Decisions are made quickly, but based on sound thinking. They realize that in today's fast moving marketplace you can't afford to sit around testing and refining, 'cos the train is leaving the station. Which is funny when you consider that over the years MS has repeatedly launched "buggy" products, even though they have been in development forever. Which is why I sincerely believe that one day Google will end up running the entire universe!
You just have to admire the sheer bloody minded ruthlessness of Jobs. News today that Apple has forced the closure of the highly popular Apple-Rumor blog ThinkSecret, doesn't surprise me in the least. As Techdirt points out, there wasn’t any legal precedent for pursuing Think Secret–they were just the messenger. Apple should have pursued the person who divulged their confidential secrets.
But, with Think Secret refusing to give up that information–and courts not likely to force them–it was easier for Apple to charge against the blog. Besides which everyone that read the thing was a 100% raving Apple Freak. But that's Steve's way, kicking everyone in the nuts, even when they love him.
With the recent news that Google is introducing some kind of encyclopedia tool by the name of "Knol," which is supposed to kill Wikipedia, it was interesting to read the opening paragraph to Rob Hof's article at BusinessWeek.com about the latest Google venture: "Funny how people always want to declare whatever Google announces as a [insert name here]-killer. Google's new tool called "Knol," which will give people a way to write "authoritative" articles about a particular subject, is supposed to kill Wikipedia."
It's usually all the competing companies that are desperately trying to come up with a "Google - Killer." Which with the ever growing mass of Google, is getting harder to do with every passing day. I firmly believe that within ten years Google will control the universe... They're even having a go at Microsoft with their Web Aps via their "Cloud Computing" business model... Early days yet. But, it could happen.
With all the news stories about peoples confidential data being lost, stolen, or seemingly vaporized, I wasn't too surprised to read about the loss of a hard drive containing personal details of three million candidates for the UK driving theory test which has gone missing from a "secure facility" in, amazingly enough, Iowa! That's right, bloody Iowa!
Reading that Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly has only just told the House of Commons the hard drive went missing in May, but 'only' includes name, address, phone number and email - no financial data. I can't imagine why any British organization would have been squirrelling this data away anywhere, never mind in Iowa.
There may be a rationale for retention of test results for future analysis, but the personal details of the candidates are of negligible relevance, and the long term retention of such data seems neither proportionate nor sensible. Is this simply another demonstration of the ever increasing obsession with retaining all forms of data that we seem to be increasingly engulfed in? Poor old George Orwell must be spinning at a high rate of knots right now!
Did you hear the news out of Japan that the Nintendo Wii attracts cockroaches? Apparently the theory can be traced to Japanese-language gaming website Barks, which claimed that the Wii gives off a cockroach-friendly frequency that attracts the pests better than a cheap transport cafe.
Most electrical equipment makes an electrical ‘hum’. But I have my doubts cockroaches are attracted by the console’s wireless connectivity because other wireless consoles have not been reported to suffer similar problems coming up through the cracks. It could be part of some Microsoft slander campaign. If you want all the details, go to Barks. But you'll have to be fluent in Japanese!
Just when you thought you'd seen every dumb celebrity endorsement ad ever produced, you need to check out the one just breaking in Germany featuring an all gold Paris Hilton promoting Champagne in a can! But not just any old champagne, this is Paris Hilton Rich Prosecco, (which isn't really champagne) and the talentless star, who will grace your New Years Eve party for a mere couple of hundred thousand is about to embark on a European tour to promote the stuff.
One of the truly awful bits is the fifteen second TV spot which looks like is was shot by an eight year old with a ten year old video camera. You'll be glad to know that even though the regular stuff is a respectable 10.5 percent alcohol, some of Paris's recovering alcoholic pals can enjoy the lower 6.5 percent breathalyser-busting, fruit flavored alternative. All of it sounds like crap to me, but maybe Paris will take a case or two on her upcoming humanitarian tour of Rwanda. I mean, who needs food when you can pack a few cases of Paris's favorite tipple on the back of your camel?
1 comment(s)
If you needed further proof that no one knows what they are doing when it comes to forecasting what people want, whether it be politics, music, films or advertising (particularly advertising,) it was the news that this weekends release, here in the US, of the expected block buster "The Golden Compass," did not live up to box office expectations after taking in a mere $9 million on the first day of its release on Friday.
Total weekend sales are expected to be about $28 million. Which when you consider it cost $180 million to shoot, it is now about to be regarded as a floperama! Maybe, just maybe, if someone in the film business decided to knock all the CGI, special effects, locations, and high priced talent on the head, and just shoot a good, but cheap movie, they might have a box office winner on their hands.
And who knows... They might have a movie worth watching... Maybe even a classic like "Plan Nine From Outer Space!"
As I get older, I wonder why so many people are so stupid. Or maybe it's me getting senile... Naahh... that's impossible! The reason for these deep thoughts is that today I was amused to read the online MSNBC News site to check out their weekly "News Quiz. This Einstein like brain teaser consists of ten questions, but one was about video games, one was about the music GRAMMY awards, and two were about sports. The remaining six were actually about the weeks news.
Why do I find this a strange and sad reflection on what is commonly referred to amongst the intelligentsia (I obviously include myself in that group) as the "Main Stream Media?" Because MSNBC also has other weekly news quizzes, including one on sports and one on entertainment. What do you think the odds are on finding that 40% of the questions on both of these sites are actually about world news and events, rather than trivia? Don't worry, I checked them out, and the answer is ZERO.
Then again, every time I get back to the UK and put the "telly" on, I either get Jimmy Saville, Cliff Richards or Terry Wogan. I rest my case.
I know it's a bit of a contradiction, particularly as I've made a very good living over the years peddling stuff to people who were not necessarily anxious to buy the stuff... But, I have to say I am appalled by the US news today that a scumbag school district in Seminole County, Florida is saving themselves a paltry $1,600 a year by having their report card holders plastered with ads for McDonalds junk food restaurants.
If some kid does well in school (which is why they are there, right?) They can now pop down to their local McDee's and get a free "Fat-Burger." Oh, and they have to show their school grades to the server in order to qualify for the offer. Problem is, the server is likely to be one of the students who got bad grades, flunked out, and is now looking forward to flipping burgers for the rest of his or her miserable life. Which means the odds are they can't read the bloody report cards anyway. So, it's all a bit of a waste of time. Wankers!
4 comment(s)
Funnily enough, whenever I get back to the "Old Sod." I am somewhat intrigued by the manic enthusiasm for Facebook I experience there. I mean C'mon guys... It's just another crappy social network. So, I was feeling pretty smug today with the news that finally, Mark Zuckerberg has owned up to the fact sometimes greed can blinker what it is that made him so successful in the first place.
The beauty of Facebook, compared to a great many of the other crappy social networking sites out there, with MySpace being the prime example, was that it didn't have a level of patently crass commercialism associated with it... Yes, it started as a network for rich college students, but it seemed to have a modicum of integrity.
Which is why anyone with half a brain would have know that with the introduction of "Beacon" this would immediately fly in the face of what this whole social networking thing was all about. I would have expected this kind of shit from MySpace, after all, it's owned by the "Wizened of Oz," Who, in spite of being 200 years old and as rich as Croesus, is always concerned about where the next dollar/euro/punt/whatever, is coming from!
You know the end of the world is at hand when you read the just breaking news that half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of this year -- That's hard-bound tomes -- were written on cell phone keyboards. While a new Japanese translation of "The Brothers Karamazov" racked up impressive sales of 320,000 copies since July, the top thumb-typed novels, like "Moshimo Kimiga" ("If You ..."), the story of a high-school girl's fight with HIV, averaged sales of 400,000 books.
The author of the 142-page "Moshimo Kimiga" is a 21-year-old nursery school teacher from Kokura who writes under the nom de phone Rin, and who originally posted the work to the Web in installments. "I typed it all on my mobile phone," she explained. "I started writing novels on my mobile when I was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so after a while it didn't take so long.
The mobile-phone novels, or "keitai shousetsu," are usually written for an audience of young female readers. ... The stories traverse teen romance, sex and drugs in a succession of one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a mobile phone. Scene and character development are notably missing. The size of the screen also necessitates short, simple sentences with basic words. Which means that a long tradition of Japanese literature will eventually disappear, to be replaced by smiling emoticons. Sayonara!
Hello... Just a quickie here... After all, even though it's only 5.30 Sunday evening in wonderfully exotic Boise, it's already 1.30 in the morning in the UK... So, I won't attempt to keep you up. I just want to burden you with a couple of easy questions...
1: Why do so few people comment on this blog? I get tons of comments on my American blogs. I also tend to swear a lot on those, but Haymarket and Gordon, don't encourage that kind of behavior here, so I have to watch my cyber mouth. Perhaps you could persuade them to think otherwise.
2: My last book "MadScam," sells extremely well in the US, but has sunk like a stone in the UK. Is this because advertising as we know and love it has lost its cache. Has everyone spent their money in the boozer. Did the "Poisoned Dwarf" outlaw freedom of AdHoSpeak.... What the hell is going on?
Let me know if you wish me to do something different. I will probably ignore your suggestions, I may even insult you in response. But, one way or another, feedback works.
2 comment(s)
The big, shock, horror, can that be true, item of the last week here in the US, is that Starbuck's, the legendary, we do not do traditional advertising icon, is now up to its armpits in -Horror - Gasp - Traditional - 30 second TV spots? (Which are actually quite lame!) Remember when this, the world's most expensive cup of coffee, grass roots company scam started out. They didn't have servers, they had "Barristas." You didn't order a large cup of Joe, you ordered a "Grande, cappuccino, mocha, frappe, douchenozzle." You could work your laptop (for a fee!!!) on the in-house Wi-Fi network while your bandana clad dog sat by your side instead of being out chasing and chewing cats.
I realized the end was finally near a couple of years ago when Starbuck's opened in Vienna... That's right, Vienna. The center of the coffee universe for two hundred or so years before Starbuck's was even a gleam in Daddy Warbuck's eyes. Damn... Double Damn.
But, the problem with Starbuck's, is the same problem every successful enterprise eventually has to face... You got too big, too fast. Now you can only get small, even faster. It's the same with ad agencies... Remember the immortal words of Jay Chiat more than twenty years ago... "I can't wait to see how big we can get before we get bad!" Damn right Jay... Ad Agencies are the worst example of inner rot... But, there again, that far too often applies to business in general.
George Parker
Blogging for:
Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 17 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 831
