IDEAS

BTW – We agree

Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.

Here’s what I took away from the talk

Grow your personal brand
Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.

Plan for backup??!!?
Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.

Information is free
The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.

Ask your customers, how they want to get information
There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.

Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:

1. Be transparent - it will help you connect with people and if you don’t say it, people will still find out
2. Be relevant – media is fractured so ask your customers how and what they like to hear from you
3. Be brief - our attention spans 140 characters at a time (or 2.7 seconds)
4. Stay top of mind – talk to people often

Again thank you Peter for the great talk.

Found this while posting the last post, 9 Technologies to help bring down the costs of our healthcare systems.  I’ve put a couple the ones I thought were amazing below, but you can read the whole article here.  Some are simple changes to current tech and some are complete revamps, but awesome all around.  Funny thing, I bet you no one will complain that we’re putting a bunch of lab workers or doctors out of jobs with this tech.  But when we try to implement technologies to make local and federal government more efficient and need less workers, everyone goes crazy about job security.

Didn’t mean to go off topic, by NJ is bankrupt but everytime they try to cut people out to save money, it turns into a huge protest and I’m tired to paying some of the highest property taxes in the nation….

Medical Acoustics Lung Flute

“People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease might be able to scale back on their meds by instead using this $40 reusable instrument (also a PopSci Best of What’s New award winner) that sends vibrations into the lungs to break up mucus. Make sure to check out the video of the Lung Flute in action, starring Senior Associate Editor Bjorn Carey and His Mucus.”

Insulin Made From Flowers

“Americans with diabetes shell out some $132 billion a year for insulin, which usually comes from genetically engineered yeast or bacteria. But Canadian scientists can make it cheaper. They inserted the human insulin gene into the common safflower plant, which churns out the drug for a fraction of the cost. Just 25 square miles of the crop could make insulin for the entire world.”

Popular Science and google have teamed up to put all 137 years of popular science magazine online…. 137 years… damn!  Read the whole story here.  Hopefully magazines like Popular Science will be able to survive in the digital world.

I’ve been saying for years that job searching costs way too much, and always thought of demolishing the whole industry by putting the craigslist business model into place for the job search industry. Looks like someone beat me to the punch, and its one of the pioneers of the industry itself! Read the whole article here

“Pioneer of online job search starts over again

Bill Warren founded an early online job board in the 1990s, helped kick-start an industry and was president of Monster.com, one of the leading Internet career sites. But these days he’s not very happy with the results.

So he’s taking another crack at it, going after Monster, Career Builder and similar commercial job sites. Warren is starting a nonprofit job listing system that could lower the costs that employers pay to list positions and make the process easier and more fruitful for applicants.

He has the enthusiastic backing of hundreds of large companies, including IBM Corp., American Express, AT&T Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, the kinds of employers that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year searching for new talent.”

This portion is a great idea that wasn’t in my original idea, but it’s a very clever idea that will help put these websites over the top:
“Companies that belong to the association pay a $15,000 annual membership fee and will receive prominent placement on the “.jobs” Web sites. Smaller companies can purchase a “.jobs” domain name for about $125 a year and then post jobs for free. They can also work through their state employment agencies, which post jobs online at no charge.

At those prices, the new “.jobs” system could be another online innovation that undercuts what currently exists — much as the invention of job boards themselves undermined newspaper help-wanted ads.”

Many people watch for just the commercials, and most like me love the game and can’t wait until next season! At the party I attended, it was like Mystery Science Theater 3000 with everyone spitting out the opinion quickly and often I would say we had more thumbs down then up, and very few that I can remember today. Godaddy (the use of females tearing off dress shirts), Doritos (funny ones, especially the Doritos ninja), Hyundai (people carrying the car), Etrade (Talking babies still work), Jay Leno, Letterman and Oprah (have no clue what it was for, but was awesome to see).

But by far the best commercial was definitely the Google one, very clever, very simple, and pulls on your heart strings. I only remember seeing it once, and it was so memorable. If you can think of a better commercial let me know in the comments, but I think they ended up with the best bang for the buck commercial by far:

Last one I swear, also from Rev3’s site, original post here.  Also will be at LW offices shortly, so swing on by
“Lenovo’s amazing Tablet/PC Hybrid brings a tablet and a PC together in an amazingly elegant way
It’s a tablet. It’s a notebook computer. This amazing technology marvel from Lenovo – shown at CES 2010 for the first time — combines an Apple-killing tablet with an amazing laptop computer!”

CES, what else can be said! Found this on Rev3’s site, check it out here.  We’ll be getting one of these in the office shortly….
“Lenovo releases the S10-3t, a convertible netbook that swivels to become either a tablet or a laptop

Looking for a tablet that doubles as a real computer? Lenovo released another Apple iTablet killer at CES 2010, the S10-3t. The new gadget runs Windows 7 and twists to turn into a tablet, or a clamshell laptop. Built around Intel’s brand new Atom N470, it has enough power to run videos and most mainstream programs. And with the first multi-touch capacative screen on the Windows platform, it’s a great touch computer as well. You can pick it up for $4500, when it ships later in January.”

Found this on Revision 3’s site from the CES show, awesome!!!  check it out here

“It’s Dell’s new slate, a concept model with a beautiful 5” screen. The handheld slate is based on Android – and includes Facebook, video playback and more.”

This pretty much blew my mind. Its all done in CGI, its some of the best Ive watched in a long time. Probably the most impressive lighting work ive seen. Watch it

After you watch Alex was kind enough to show a bit of the process to make it. Watch the video revealing some compositing of The Third & The Seventh.

Motiongrapher also has a interview with him about some process. Check it out.

Breaking news…. but not broken by me

Ran into this over at Mashable. Have to admit, competition is awesome for the public in general.  If it wasn’t for Apple kicking azz and taking names in the last decade with the Ipod and Iphone, we’d all still have “Smart” phones like the blackberry… man I can’t stand that device…  (10, 9, 8, calm down now)….

Now it seems like any product coming out has to have an amazing look and touch functionality to even compete.  Now it seems Microsoft is throwing their hat in the mix with the Courier Tablet.  It looks amazing, and it’s even been rumored that an LW employee who is a hardcore Mac user (who will not be named) is looking forward to the device.  Hopefully RJay will let me play with it once he gets his hands on one… ooooops

Here’s some of the post:

“As we were clued into by earlier leaks, the Infinite Journal is the key metaphor for Courier. It’s like an enormous notebook for collecting pretty much any kind of content: clippings from the web, your own notes, diagrams and drawings, photos from the on-board camera, etc. Each item gets a timestamp and geotag, and you can add more tags for better searchability as well.

Several key “views” into your Journal are detailed in the leaked document, including a Smart Agenda that acts as a sort of a Cliff Notes representation of your entire journal, making important items visible at a glance. The Journal Overview is another style of at-a-glance window into the journal contents, with an integrated search interface. The Library is the main file browser metaphor that organizes everything by type. The left screen acts as a “favorites” tray where you can sticky your most important apps and projects in one place.

Also detailed is the Browser (pictured below), allowing you to easily clip content from the web into your journal. You can also flip through your history with a vertical Cover Flow-like index card system. Another handy organization metaphor is the ability to “tuck” items into the device’s spine to temporarily store something and move it from one section of your journal to another.”

Read the whole post here