Thursday, January 26, 2006
Marketing & Innovation has moved
The Marketing & Innovation Blog has moved and is now available at the following URL: http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/
Monday, January 16, 2006
Access 250 newspapers from 55 countries
PressDisplay.com is a website which publishes pdf versions of a great number of newspapers From Around the World. I have been amazed by its ability to let you browse through the list of available countries and then choose the desired newspaper. This is actually triggering a question. One may think that journalists are shooting themselves in the foot by publishing (or letting others publish) their information online. Of course, some of it - mainly the archives are only accessible to subscribers. For instance, Time magazine will let subscribers print and read Time online if you have a valid username and password. But secure access does not prevent sharing, and it is yet to be proven that openness is beneficial for contents providers. Of course, it enables people from remoter locations to look at these newspapers that they would not be able to buy anyway. By the way, access to the information contained by the website is not free. When provinding your email address (check those spammers!) you will be able to test the Web site for 7 days and 7 issues for free.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Emergence Marketing
Emergence Marketing is another weblog dedicated to Marketing & Innovation. Gabe D'Annunzio and François Gossiaux are its owners, and the owners of Corante. Corante is an initiative aimed at creating a network (the Corante Network) and hubs where each hub is a handled by experts. So in a way, it's a semi open social network where each hub contributor is an expert and not just a Mr Nobody. See Corante's Marketing blog page which is packed with Marketing & Social material. Exciting new venture. FYI, François Gossiaux is the former head of Marketing for Eroom, a company that was taken over by Documentum (itself acquired by EMC)
Amazing Online Jukebox Pandora Could Make Long Tail Even Longer
The Pandora project enables you to create your own radio stations based on music you liked and delivering new titles you hadn't thought of or even didn't know that they existed. It's a great way to discover new artists. Could it be considered a new media? Could it replace your good old radio one day? On should we even envisage that future radio sets - being connected to the Internet - could deliver that kind of programme through your radio set or hifi tuner?Besides, should we consider that this is the neginning of the end of real-time radio listening as we knew it. Whta is certain is that if we were to replace our regular radio stations with online widgets like these, we could actually wave goodbye to radio commercials as we know them. Or should we invent new forms of commercials instead?
Christopher Allen's History of Social Software
The evolution of Social Software according to Christopher Allen is available online in his blog entitled "Life with Alacrity".
Thursday, December 29, 2005
PERFORMANCING: A Blog Editor That Sits Within Firefox
Performancing is a brand new Blog editor that sits within your Firefox browser. It enables users who are new to blogging to create a blog very easily.It also enables you to upload a file to your blog, but the limit set on file uploads is very low. Not quite sure what the benefit of using Performancing is compared to Blogger or another online blogging system. Explanations/comments welcome ...
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
BT's Vision on Digital Content Provision
British Telecom has published the following article on the decline of traditional media and the development of new digital content. They are expressing this vision while promoting their new line of service devoted to content provision. In 2001, BT started to work on the delivery of a Standard Delivery Platform (SDP). Their aim has been to 'enable the industry to standardise'. In June 2005, and after a long period of incubation, they decided to spin off the existing department a new entity co-owned by FT and NVP (New Venture Partners). This new entity is entitled iO and delivers special contents services to MVNO's. Their webpage is available at http://iogloballtd.com/iO-Home.html
Monday, December 19, 2005
Climate Change: Should Marketers Go On Working Unabated?
A new scientist article about global warming and its consequences in Europe is raising fears that Europe might enter a new ice age. Not much to do with Marketing and Innovation you will say. Well I think just the other way round. It has everything to do with Marketing and Innovation. We as professionals go on working unabated and our aim is to produce riches. There is nothing wrong with this obviously - as long as it is done ethically - but what can we say about the consequences of the 'new' economy we are generating and its impact on the world. Indeed, we are no more guilty about this than our forefathers, and maybe less even.But what difference does it make to the world as we know it? Would we be able to pursue our activities if Europe became a mere slab of ice? Would we be able to sell more LCD screens if no electricity could be produced anymore? Could we go on with Web 2.0 if a major disaster was taking place and you could not live in your flat anymore? Surely, survival would be number one on your and everyone else's agenda. So like it or not we are all part of it. But what can we do about this? Is it not too late anyway? If there anything we can do to change things in the short term? Or is it just a matter of waiting for scientists to be proven wrong about climate change. After all, only a few years back, when people were asking whether that particular heatwave in Europe was linked to Global Warming, the same scientists were denying the facts. It seems that they have changed their minds this time but it may change again I am sure.
Come what may, should we not surmise that Marketing should also encompass such Society issues and become more caring about people and the environment? If so, will that apply to emerging countries too? After all, I saw that air transportation for passengers went up by 7% in 2005 (2 billion passengers carried i.e. up by 100 million on 2004). Should we deny the right to travel to the increasingly well off Chinese for instance, who find it possible at last to roam the world freely after so many years of oppression? Is it really fair? It seems like changing the world for anyone of us individually is an impossible task. We had better leave this to our governments, but still ... maybe doing something about it could be a nice thing too, even though it looks like a daunting task for a single human being.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Web 2.0 gone mad
It's not because you are a collaborative work enthusiast that you have to agree with everything that is going on in the name of so-called WEB 2.0. A USA today editorial published on Nov 29th entitled "A false Wikipedia biography" is making our hair stand on end. How come anybody can log in to a system as visible as Wikipedia and fabricate a biography for a living person. Besides, other online encyclopedias have copied this information too.One may imagine what it would be if someone started to rewrite history in that manner. Historical characters would not be able to rise from the dead in order to correct such mistakes. In retrospect, this is more than just outrageous. What we are seeing here is the end of a myth around collaboration, it is Web 2.0 gone mad (see previous entry about Nicholas Carr's latest article against the Web 2.0 craze). And Web 2.0 gone mad is just like 1984(*) with people rewriting history as they like. There has to be - eventually - limits to our freedom of speech, and these limits are set by the general interest. Failing to understand this would definitely kill Web 2.0 and the wonderful tools brought by the Internet.
(*) George Orwell, 1984, Penguin Books Ltd ISBN: 0140126716
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