The Internet speed issue becomes a legal matter. Finland is the first one to break the ice, setting a minimum of 1 mega/second for every Finnish citizen.
As their Minister of Communication – Suvi Linden – states, the Internet services are no longer only a matter of entertainment.
We’re curious how these changes will affect the provider-consumer relations and whether this is only the beginning and the Internet services will become a subject of more legal frames.
Recently I found a very interesting and not at all boring consumer research on Trendwatching. The guys made 6 simple, easy and catchy survey-footages among usual common people.
They went out on the streets and asked people from London, Tokyo, Singapore and such other cities what mobile phones they carry. You would be surprised to hear most of the answers. And in case you want to develop a brand, of any kind, the next footage might reveal you some precious facts about branding & positioning versus sameness.
To which category of the two above would you subscribe your brand?
If so, this might be of great fun & interest to you.
Most of you should know about the Fun Theory, initiated by Volkswagen. The company brings some new fun to it these days with the launching of VW Polo GTI.
The marketing campaign, run exclusively on the Facebook official page, is comprised of a platform with the following motto: “Fast Lane – Driven by Fun”.
The Fast Lane Facebook page can bring you to the action faster, if you’re in a hurry and below you can see how the people in Berlin were driven by fun:
I can only guess that Eric Fischer thought of this when he designed the following maps. The red dots show the most popular photo spots among tourists. The blue ones are the popular photo spots for locals. The yellow ones are undetermined.
The author used the GPS information of images on Flickr, combined with the home city of the user taking a certain photo.
Now sit back and make your holiday itinerary, the summer vacation is so close.
London
Moscow
New York
For the full gallery at high resolution and city hints (79 cities), go here.
Dan Pink starts his 10 minute fabulous presentation with a short and precise statement: “The science is unbelievably surprising. The science is a little bit freaky”.
Determined to state this by some interesting studies he analysed, the guy explains us a little bit what the motivation drives are for specific categories of people.
We leave you with 10 minutes very worth watching, which will hopefully raise at the end one single important question to all of you, dear readers: what motivates you to wake up daily and go to work?
David Griner with his article on The Social Path and Google with its recently new keyboard toy started some thinking and debates around the office related to the future usage of classical keyboards versus touchscreens. Do you think that the next generation will ever use a keyboard again?
We’re already resignated to the thought that our children and grandchildren will never use the Chinese Fountain Pens we had and will never get stained with blue ink while practicing neat writing. The future sounds like this: you touch the screen with your finger and the word is there.
The present already offers us plenty of this innovative writing: smart phones and smart displays, controllers for video games and all sorts of smart tricks used by platforms like Google, which are able to predict the words you want to type, so that you can quit writing the full sentence and resume to pressing “enter”. There is also Swype, the finger-tracing text programm and the list is open to daily releases.
That should make it easier for us to accept that this is the future; maybe also the present, as 2 year olds are able to use an iPhone before being able to read or to write.
We’ve got our own classical pro&con list, which we leave open for your opinions.
For the pro we can track down the following: touchscreens are smaller and slimmer, so you save up space. They can easily be improved, with a software update. They offer the option to switch the language automatically and they can perform translations on the content. And then there are the smarter touchscreens, like the iPhone, which can predict the letters you want to type and make it easier and faster to select those ones.
For the con we would start with the lack of a touch feedback: when pressing a button, you have the physical evidence of your action and you wait for an answer, whereas when dealing with a touchscreen, you can have a delay in answer and may find yourself in the situation of not knowing what to do – wait or type the same leter 10 times until you get a confusing display? Another con point would be that you cannot use a touchscreen without looking. You may be able to type on a physical keyboard just by feeling the letters and watch the screen or something else at the same time; but touchscreens require your full attention.
Some experts give an insight on the world of touchscreens here.
And while they do this, we can think of what to do with all the free space we save by using touchscreens: maybe store some books and oldfashioned diaries? Nostalgia has to be fed somehow.
Derek Sivers, musician, professional clown and entrepreneur, talks at TED about how to start a successful movement. Inspirational both for flash-mob initiators and less conventional business men.
We all consume one thing or another. That’s why we’re writing about it, it’s in ourselves and everywhere around us.
One of the first people that categorized consumers was Everett M. Rogers, after some studies made by Ryan and Gross. He defined four types of consumers in connection to their perspectives towards innovation: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.
However, we’re facing a paradigm upgrade which might configure the present categories in a different manner. One of the criteria used for the Rogers model was gender and sexual orientation. Nevertheless, the new worldwide attitude towards gay couples is changing and they start being perceived as not-to-be-neglected-anymore entities by the legal and social rules. Therefore, they become consumers by this new input, which brings us to personalized targeting, which brings us to this Levi’s ad:
Here’s one thing that never goes out of fashion: GENEROSITY. It’s always welcome, painless, free and it implies a minimum of emotional effort.
Some big names noticed this and embedded it in their activity, with multiple great results. Apart from the predictable ones that related to fame, money, satisfaction and so on, I will state the two ones that I find most resuming:
1. People that weren’t consumers of their brand, became consumers over night with no kind of effort whatsoever.
2. Some of these people were really happy about all of this. Simple words, great results.
More on generosity as a trend you can find here or here. Or everywhere around you, let’s hope:).
A few good and very good people experienced in creation, PR, strategy and
project management with whom you can freely communicate here or at
aquarium@friendsadvertising.ro
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