The Red Planet Blog

To tick or untick

I'm on the National Express East Coast train traveling from Edinburgh to London and am delighted to discover that internet access is now free (you had to pay for it on GNER).  Calling it "broadband" is a stretch, though - according to BroadbandSpeedchecker it's 136Kpbs Down and 85Kbps Up - but then again I am able to do *this* for free so I shouldn't complain.

Anyway to get the free internet you have to log in with an email address - technically there's no real reason why this is necessary...  Once you give your email address you are then offered the usual "can we and some other random people send you spam" tick box.  However, it's worded thus:

"If you do not wish to receive ... please untick the box"

For the second time this week such an option has strained my brain trying to figure out whether ticking the box will result in me getting spam or not.  Go on, try to figure it out yourself.  Methinks the vagueness is intentional...

Stu ;-)

Phishy BT email

I received this email today.

It purports to be from BT offering me a deal on a wireless Home Hub and a rebate cheque - but it has all of the hallmarks of a phishing email.

• The email is not personalised to me

• Links in the email lead me to a web page asking me for lots of personal information, yet it acknowledges me as an existing customer (so they'd surely have this information?)

• Links in the email are not to BT's main web site

However, after much digging in the email's Raw Source and just a gut feeling, I think the email is real.

1. If the email is a phishing email, it's worryingly good and likely effective.

2. If the email is genuine, then someone at BT's marketing department should be fired for sending out this incompetent and reckless email.

I searched for "phishing" on BT's web site to find out who to forward the email to for verification - there were no results.  Are BT ignorant of this problem?  Even my useless bank have such a service.

I've emailed a general enquiry to BT.  I'll let you know the result.

Stu

Why I can't share "The Dip"

Marketing guru Seth Godin published his book "The Dip" last year.  The New York Times best-seller turns the "winners don't quit" maxim on its head by pointing out that when your company hits "The Dip" then it *is* time to quit.

Ever innovative, Seth asks his blog readers today to help double the readership of his book - not by buying more copies, but by loaning it to friends.

"Loaning"? How can one make money out of that?  Well, personal recommendation is the ultimate form of advertising, and Seth will sell copies of his other books by the barrowload as a result.  It's not rocket science.

Here's the problem.  I bought The Dip as a download for my Amazon Kindle.  Because of the DRM I am unable to share the file with anyone.  In fact, by putting DRM on the Kindle files Amazon are saying that *loaning* is at best a no-no, and at worse illegal. 

Looks like my friends won't be buying Seth Godin books from Amazon on my recommendation then...

Stu ;-)

ps  Of course, I don't own a Kindle, and I'm being facetious.  But hopefully you get the point...

HD-DVD v Blu-ray: It's probably all over...

Toshiba have purchased a 30-second $2.7 million Superbowl advertising slot in a last ditch effort to support the flailing HD-DVD format - having obviously noticed that *no-one* is buying their decks or discs.

I reckon that the very act of doing this magnifies their desperation.

In Peter Chippendale's excellent book "Dished: The Rise and Fall of BSB", he reported that BSB's CEO Anthony Simmonds-Gooding said that on the brink of bankruptcy (prior to the merger with Sky) they had spent so much money marketing the enterprise it would have been cheaper to have just given the Squarials away (and thus built up a large and appreciative audience).

If Toshiba are at the stage of desperately throwing money about, have they not considered building up a user-base by giving away their players for free, like Xerox do with printers?  I'd have a free one thanks!  The software business realised years ago how to establish a market by initially giving their product away (eg RealPlayer and Macromedia Flash).  That $2.7 million could have been used to give away 21,428 $126 Tosh decks to anyone who bought an HD-DVD film from Amazon/HMV/Walmart/whoever - all who would have done the marketing of the great giveaway offer at no cost to Toshiba.

I thought that one of the biggest jaw-drop moments of the 15 Jan Macworld was a comment by Jim Gianopulos, Chairman & CEO of 20th Century Fox.  Watch this clip and not only hear Jim declare Blu-ray the winner, listen to the non-partizan audience laugh in mocking agreement.  Very telling.

Stu ;-)

ps  Yes Blu-ray is the better technology, but so was Betamax...

Hasbro's Scrabulous idiocy

So Hasbro is using it's big-gun lawyers to pull Scrabulous off Facebook.

Nice move Hasbro. Scrabble, a dying, minority boardgame played by old people has been given an amazing and new lease of life on the hottest social network site out there, played by around 600,000 people (and the App subscribed to by just short of 2.4 million people).  So shutting it down would be a good move then?!

Didn't Hasbro think of buying the property and re-naming it Online Scrabble? Or, doing some kind of licencing deal?  It would have been worth just giving them the license for free.  Didn't they see the marketing opportunities, keeping the game alive.  At the very least Scrabulous users could have been offering discounts off the boardgame?

As one Scrabulous fan wrote on the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook page "I didn't have any Scrabble sets when I started playing Scrabulous a few months ago. I got hooked and have since bought two sets."

Scrabulous has surely been the most innovative of marketing for a board game ever, certainly I know of no better example of using the concept of the Social Object to market a product.  This kind of marketing is phenomenal - it cost Hasbro nothing and was driven by fans who have no other motivation other than passion for the game. No-one is making a bean out of Scrabulous (it's a free game) except Hasbro who are selling more more Scrabble board games as a result of Scrabulous introducing the game to a new online generation.

Hasbro are grade "A" idiots, compounded by the fact that, with their marketing millions, they really should have thought of it first.

Stu

Prince Charles and those pesky DVDs

I heard a curious story on BBC Radio Four's "Today" programme today reporting that Prince Charles said he prefers VHS cassettes to DVDs.  His reason was that you can more easily find the place you were at previously on a VHS tape than on a DVD.  The quote comes from an interview in this month's Esquire magazine, and the Guardian newspaper has already jumped on the bandwagon mocking Charles for the comment.

I have to admit, my first thoughts were a mix of "doh, idiot" and "well, it's a Bank Holiday Friday, there's clearly no news today".  But then I realised that in this apparent non-story there as a quite profound statement about how our supposed enlightenment through technology is alienating everyone who was born before the invention of the transistor.

Our much maligned Monarch-to-be actually makes a very valid point if you think about it.  In the creation of the new digital wonder-technology - the DVD - we actually lost some of the intuitive simplicity of the old analogue format.  And that's not really progress is it?

I'm more responsible than most for technology worship, but with our numerous gizmos we do sometimes over-complicate our life.  I once saw two people in a bar spend 10 minutes trying to Bluetooth their phone numbers to each other and failing.  On giving up one said to the other "I'll just email it to you" and the other agreed.  I couldn't help myself intervening by asking "why don't you just write your phone numbers on pieces of paper and exchange them".  They looked at me as if I'd stepped off the Ark as my suggestion simply didn't compute in their digital-or-nothing world.

Clearly, technology has brought lateral thinking to a grinding halt.  We've forgotten how to do things without technology, and the problem is that we now totally disregard those even further down the learning-curve than us.

In our 24 and CSI world, where everything is online and instant, technology appears to have delivered the Arthur C Clark promise that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".  But the reality is that technology is still very primitive and pretty pointless if you're not a geek.  Connecting to a computer network, wireless or otherwise, is unforgivably complicated; the programming of a video is still as difficult as it's always been; after a century of existence you still can't easily time-shift record radio and the introduction of the computer to banking seems to have have sent customer service hurtling back in time several decades.

Prince Charles made a very valid complaint, and someone needs to ask why in creating the DVD we lost a most basic of requirements when we have such an array of wondrous technology that we could have employed to improve on it. 

When designing a DVD Menu or Web page I ask myself, "could my mother use this".  From now on, I'll be asking if it's simple enough for Prince Charles to use.  And it will be a sincere question, not sarcasm.

Stu ;-)

Otters holding hands and the state of TV

This isn't just an excuse to show a cute video (okay, maybe it is), but this video of two otters "holding hands", shot by Cynthia Holmes at Vancouver Aquarium has at the time of writing had more than 2 million views on YouTube.

Can I just point out that this clip has therefore been seen by more people than watched the number one programme on any of the UK digital channels (number 1 being "Live International Football", Saturday 23 March, Sky Sports 1: 1.77 million - courtesy Broadcast Magazine 30 March 2007).

What does this mean for the future of television?  Discuss.

Stu ;-)

You can't say that Splenda isn't good for you...

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about protecting your website domain names by buying not only multiple top-level domain variations (eg .com .co.uk .net etc), but also variations of your company name to prevent cyber-squatters and instances of passing off.  However, last week an interesting twist to this story emerged.

Rider Thompson at the Sustainable is Good website discovered that Tate and Lyle and Johnson and Johnson, the makers of sucralose-based sweetener Splenda have secured between 200 and 300 second-level domain names that contain the Splenda name combined with negative wording. To declare an interest, I use Splenda myself, and I'm aware that there are some alleged health issues surrounding its use but none have so far put me off using it. Read this list, though, and ponder what Tate and Lyle and Johnson and Johnson know that make them fear the existence of the following:

splendakills.com / sucralosekills.com
thedangersofsplenda.com / thedangersofsucralose.com
victimsofsplenda.com / victimsofsucralose.com
splendasideeffects.com / sucralosesideeffects.com

I understand that Splenda's makers have to protect themselves from unfounded allegations being made against them, but this revelation has had more of a negative influence on me than any health report.  It's had the effect of making me research the potential dangers of sucralose and I'm seriously questioning whether I'll buy Splenda again in the future.  When this hits the mainstream press I wonder who else will be affected by this shooting-themselves-in-the-foot story.

Stu ;-)

Tipped off by Seth Godin's blog.

Dodgy Docs, and Domain Registration

When registering your domain name it's always a good idea to register a range of top-level domains - ie .com .net .co.uk etc. 

Not doing so could cause all sorts of problems and, in the case of domain name registration company Network Solutions, embarrassment.  Their web site is www.networksolutions.com however if you visit www.networksolutions.co.uk you'll find IT Week squatting there.  You'd really think that a domain name registration company would have had that problem covered...

A few years ago, I was the Technical Director of comedy group "The Funjabis".  Registration for their website www.funjabis.com slipped and was snapped up by a cybersquatter.  Their web designer received a flurry of emails asking why the Funjabi website was now a porn site!  The comedy troupe had to register www.funjabis.co.uk and tell their thousands of reader to point their browsers there instead.

Of course, as well as registering a bunch of first-level domains, it's also worth considering a variety of second-level domain alternatives too....

When I heard that the Advertising Standards Authority were investigating You Are What You Eat presenter "Doctor" Gillian McKeith leading to her no longer calling herself "Doctor" in advertising (because she's not), I had a thought:

Ms McKeith's website is www.drgillianmckeith.com

Right enough, she's sensibly also registered www.drgillianmckeith.co.uk , www.drgillianmckeith.net , www.drgillianmckeith.info and even www.drgillianmckeith.tv

I then wondered if her ego extended to dropping the "Dr".

No.

Both www.gillianmckeith.com and www.gillianmckeith.co.uk have been snapped up by cybersquatters, with pretend website directories linking to all manner of dodgy diet pills and the like.

I don't doubt she'd have a case against them, but it amused me that the dodgy doctor is so arrogant (some may say deluded by her own fantasy) that dropping the "Dr" moniker for web registration didn't even occur to her.

And therein lies a lesson for us all.

Stu ;-)

Pic courtesy of b3ta

Honda's robot child

Step into our edit suites and as well as the 1950's sci-fi posters, you'll see the army of toy robots. From Gort and Robby the Robot, through Daleks and Cybermen to Robosapien (V2), they're a bit of an obsession of mine.

So, when I watched this latest commercial from Honda featuring Asimo, I literally started crying.  Advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy have perfectly captured the very thing I most love about Asimo - it looks like a child - and in this advert it behaves like a child.  More specifically it hits a note with me, because it's set in a science museum and Asimo has the same sense of awe and wonder I had as a child visiting the National Museum of Scotland and seeing a dinosaur skeleton for the first time.

Truly beautiful, and without a shadow of doubt, my advert of the year.  W+K's little doco below is nice too.

Stu ;-)

ps  In the branding world, Orange have completely lost me.  They used to understand me, now their adverts mean nothing to me.  Honda get me completely.