Insights for Marketing in a Digital World

I've just been turned on to the Economics of Free . A theory that encourages innovators to bake free into business models. Mike Masnick writes on Techdirt :

I think innovative brand experiences come from studying the intersection of culture, technology and business. When companies can provide experiences that are wholly unique, have utility, are based in scalable engineering and make money - they're delivering value. Hotel Everland is a cool, inspiring example of what happens when artists, engineers and business people think WITH the box.

We Americans are an interesting bunch - especially once you focus in on our real priorities. According to some recent studies on the effect the down-turned economy is having on consumer purchasing behavior, we're willing to pull our spending away from brands for core staples such as eggs and baby formula, but when it comes to alcoholic beverages - we're steady as she goes.

A while back, a colleague and I were researching the collision of "reality" and "virtual reality". Trying to forecast what impact the adoption of multiple digital personas would have on mankind and what that means for marketers. As far as we could tell, there was no other term that easily summarized our conclusions - so we coined our own: HyperLife. Hyperife is increasingly responsible for a myriad of problems as well as opportunities challenging civil society:

Picture it…you're in your cubicle, banging your head on your desktop, agonizing over your next great marketing campaign. For inspiration, you've reviewed campaigns from yesteryear, surfed the Internet to see what your competition is doing, logged on to the American Marketing Association website, and read dozens of trade journals. Nada! The dull thud of your forehead hitting the laminate counter echoes the ticking of the clock. You're running out of time and your triple shot espresso is wearing off.

Thanksgiving has come and gone and in my household there is a small tradition we have to help ease the pain of waiting with baited breath for almost a full month until we get our grubby little hands on our presents. What we like to do is give everyone in our house a small gift, what we like to call our "After Turkey Present". We usually try to make it something under $30USD and it has to be something that is not only totally awesome, but amusing and fun as well. This year the little lady gave me one of the most awesome presents I have ever received.

I'm excited. Actually, "excited" is an understatement. I'm so beyond happy there are no words to describe it. So yesterday I decided to buy a new track jacket from the Mozilla Store which would serve two important purposes for me.

A few weeks ago I was sitting around the table with a few of my friends discussing random tidbits about our jobs in the web development world. One of my friends who mostly does graphic design and a bit off CSS styling was complaining about the lack of a grid overlay for CSS programming like you could find available in Adobe's Fireworks and Photoshop suites. After sitting around and thinking about it for a second or two, I realized there was no reason why there could not be such a tool available.

There is a trick to playing embedded flash video backwards AND making it look good!Noah and I were working on a big FEI project where we had videos exported from Maya of their new Helios microscope. We needed the videos to play both backwards and forwards in Flash. When we first tried they played great forward, but VERY BADLY in reverse. We tried a lot of different of things to attempt to make them play fine in reverse and finally discovered the solution.