cute claymation ad

ya ya it’s an ad, and i’m falling for the viral strategy.

this does bring up an interesting point about personalization and emotional tone in products. a laptop is just a laptop right? you can put a gel on the back and make it mildly more fun, but how interactive are they?

i’m expecting some clever laptop manufacturer to build a tamogachi or furby kind of pet or interactions into their laptops. it already has a notion of ’sleeping’, why not have them purr when you pet your laptop?

sony walkman

photo by bbc

the bbc, in a humorous fit of genius, asked a 13-year old to trade his ipod for a 30 year old sony walkman for a week, and then report back. nostalgia and wit ensued.

my favorite quote: “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.”

remember, you’re not the customer

i think it’s hard for engineers to remember that mass market consumers are have a really different view of technology. this might help.

sometimes i wonder if a useful mantra for mass market consumer products might be for the engineers to make a product that they would not like — that would be perhaps boring for them or not as abstract.

google ad filtering

friend keith discovered recently that ads show up in google mail that relate to the content of the email you’re reading, UNLESS you are reading about a tragedy or notable disaster. this he discovered was to prevent inappropriate ads from showing up.

i remember when google ads first appeared, reading a news item once and seeing a coffin ad appear next to a particularly inappropriate piece of news.

so his latest culture jamming suggestion? keith is adding a signature file to his emails that describes some natural disaster or calamity. thereby, email you receive from him will naturally be ad free. clever keith!