Wednesday, July 31, 2002

The Making of a BattleMech. CSG Starfury One January evening Jim arrived home from work early and there were two pickup trucks in the driveway with him. Oh yeah, he had said something about getting a couple of old shipping crates for the kids to play with. He and his friends unloaded the crates and dragged them into the garage. Little did either of us know then that these crates would take over our garage for many months to come and keep Jim very busy for the next seven months. [Michael J. Hehir's Radio Weblog] 10:27:16 PM    comment []

Hacking Taxi Cab Billboards. The Sizzle: What's Up In Digital Marketing and Advertising "A new technology developed by Vert, a small company based in Somerville, Mass., transforms ads on top of taxicabs into real-time, animated electronic billboards. Vert's software, first tested in the Boston area, lets advertising messages change according to ZIP codes, neighborhoods, even city blocks, enabling marketers to target audiences in a way never before possible with outdoor transit advertising. With Vert, a Webserver, built into taxi-top screens, communicates with a global positioning system. The GPS determines the taxi's location. In turn, a wireless modem, which keeps in touch with Vert's central server, delivers the relevant ads for a particular area. So, a cab passing through a city's financial district can display stock quotes. Another traveling in a Latino neighborhood can relay ad messages in Spanish. Or a taxi at an airport can beam temperatures of major cities to travelers. The messages appear in color on the taxi screens-10 times brighter than televisions-in a format similar to Web banner ads.... One company test-driving the technology is Lycos. 'We thought it was perfect for Lycos because you can target by city blocks or areas of the city,' says Kim Patrick, vice president of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, the Boston agency handling a $20 million year-long campaign for Lycos. The Vert-enabled cabs are part of a $1.2 million effort within the larger campaign to attract 18- to 34-year-olds in 'unexpected places.' By year's end, roughly 200 Vert-enabled cabs will be deployed in Boston and in New York...." [Business 2.0, via Andy Rhinehart] Sounds like something out of Minority Report (how long before they're talking directly to you). It's definite eye candy for pedestrians, but won't it be distracting for other drivers? As Andy says, "some heavy information shifting" going on here in terms of moving targeted advertising to where people are. Another example in the news today is Sony Ericsson's upcoming 60-day PR campaign to plant actors in tourist attractions and clubs to get people to notice and interact with their new T68i cell phone (which can also be used as a digital camera or for videoconferencing). I'll admit that if I was at a bar and I saw someone videoconferencing with the T68i, I'd go up and talk to them, but then I'd do that almost anywhere with any cool gadget. [The Shifted Librarian] 10:38:11 AM    comment []

Projection Keyboard Development Kit Available. For OEMs to integrate virtual keyboards into future mobile devices. [allNetDevices Wireless News] 10:36:50 AM    comment []

They Also Need Someone Who Thinks Up Better Names, Too. Camera Makers Unveil New Media Format "The new xD-Picture Card will be less than an inch square and will be capable of storage capacities of up to 8GB.... Fuji and Olympus will begin selling cameras with xD-Picture Card this fall, along with Fuji-branded cards in 16MB, 32MB, 64MB and 128MB capacities. Adapters that allow the cards to work in PC card and Compact Flash slots will also be available. Advantages of the new format include its compact size and significantly faster data transfer speeds. A card with capacity of 64MB or higher can record data at 3MB per second, according to Fuji, six times faster than a comparable SmartMedia card.... 'To be honest, Fuji and Olympus don't have the clout to make this catch on,' [Niebel] said. 'It's going to be a very niche market.' " [CNET News.com] Agreed. More format choices = bad, although when you get beyond 128 MB, there's some incentive. Smaller memory cards worry me because I have a difficult enough time keeping track of my Sony memory sticks. Anything smaller (the xD-Picture Card is about the size of a penny) and I might accidentally eat it thinking I'm grabbing a breath mint out of my bag. Besides, the user interface for tracking 8 GB worth of pictures would be unreal. I have problems organizing the 6 GB on my Archos Jukebox MP3 player, so 8 GB of anything that I'd have to wade through on  a small device would probably make my head explode. The industry needs some serious usability testing and implementation before introducing this much memory in a package that small. [The Shifted Librarian] 8:41:18 AM    comment []

Guerilla Marketing. WSJ.   Guerilla marketing for a new phone/camera product from SonyEricsson.  >>>In one initiative, dubbed Fake Tourist, 60 trained actors and actresses will haunt tourist attractions such as the Empire State Building in New York and the Space Needle in Seattle. Working in teams of two or three and behaving as if they were actual tourists, the actors and actresses will ask unsuspecting passersby to take their pictures.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Whenever I'm in public taking photos with my PEG-NR70V, people always come over and ask me "Hey, what's that?" I explain the camera, the MP3 player, the movie player, the memory sticks etc, and people really seem to dig it. The point is, this campaign will probably help, right up until the subject of price comes up, much like with my Clie. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog] 8:30:31 AM    comment []

Boeing Joins Scientists to Defy Gravity. BBC World News -- Researchers at the world's largest aircraft maker, Boeing, are using the work of a controversial Russian scientist to try to create a device that will defy gravity. The company is examining an experiment by Yevgeny Podkletnov, who claims to have developed a device which can shield objects from the Earth's pull. ... The project is being run by the top-secret Phantom Works in Seattle, the part of the company which handles Boeing's most sensitive programmes. The head of the Phantom Works, George Muellner, told the security analysis journal Jane's Defence Weekly that the science appeared to be valid and plausible. ... Boeing is the latest in a series of high-profile institutions trying to replicate Dr Podkletnov's experiment. The military wing of the UK hi-tech group BAE Systems is working on an anti-gravity programme, dubbed Project Greenglow. The US space agency, Nasa, is also attempting to reproduce Dr Podkletnov's findings, but a preliminary report indicates the effect does not exist. (07/31/02) [Synergic Earth News] 8:21:24 AM    comment []