Wednesday, March 19, 2003

HP's Websigns: Information in Places Forget the tired and tiresome scenario of fast-food joints spamming you with e-coupons when you walk past them. What you want is the ability to point your phone down the street you are walking and ask "any good Chinese restaurants in this direction?" When I was researching Smart Mobs, one of the hotbeds of interesting work was Hewlett-Packard's Cooltown laboratory. EE Times now reports on HP's "Websigns" project -- a schema whereby mobile devices can find and access web pages associated with people, places, and services. [Smart Mobs] Interesting idea. DNS created a new "space" and a new "land rush", as everyone figured out that good domain names were going fast. With a domain space service (DSS), the name space is implicitly tied to the physical location (say GPS coords). So, would HP control the DSS and only offer GPS coord regions to people who already control physical regions, like stores and buildings? Would federal, state, and local governments keep the common spaces common in the DSS? Also, could I leave digital messages for others at specific GPS locations? That'd be one hellofa scavenger hunt! 10:00:03 PM

New Ad Format: The Fast Forwarded :30 Advertisers might take note of a new study just released by P & G that showed similar ad recall rates for those fast-forwarding through ads using a PVR and those that don't. So...now :30's can be compressed into :5's, get the same recall, and save a bundle of media dollars. Stranger things have happened. [via Ad Age] [Adrants] My wife will be both happy and sad to hear this. 9:43:21 PM