These my micropostings and bookmarks – September 17th through September 29th:
Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie – Nice online tool to script and create ‘3d movies’. A way to have gags, stories etc voiced by 3d avatars and put straight onto YouTube etc.
Last night I spoke at a BIMA dinner, since I’d been asked by Justin Cooke, the new Chair of BIMA and CEO of Fortune Cookie.
The format was a nice, intimate one: a couple of dozen digital and ecommerce folk, cosy restaurant on Piccadily and, er, me.
It was only after I’d accepted (and the first Netimperative email landed) that it dawned on me that I’d never done a ‘speech’ before. Much as I hate powerpoint, all of my public speaking to date had involved a projector, a script and some pictures. I suddenly felt very nervous indeed!
Turned out OK though – the time passed very quickly and the questions were lively. I spoke on some themes I’m keen on:
the role of ecommerce – taking some of the points from my musings on the Chief Electricity Officer (blog post)
These my micropostings and bookmarks – September 8th through September 15th:
ToyCamera – Art&Mobile – Wonderful add-in app that turns the crap camera of iPhones up to the 3g into a fun, creative thing – with lo-fi simulations of various cameras and styles. Instant Lomo? Lolo? 1974 colour? All here 🙂 I love it.
Lomography Store… – Woo. Lomo store. Not _that_ far from the new Leica Store (“experience”) off Bond Street. Film photography seems renascent – provided your name begins with “L”. Lodak? Lolaroid? anyone?
I was really pleased to be invited to moderate a discussion at the Google Retail Summit – on “eCommerce Excellent – winning this Christmas”.
The event brought the great and good together to hear from Google and each other and followed the successful and enjoyable inaugural event last year (Google’s site, my blog post).
On my panel I was joined – with great humour and good will – by Steve Robinson, CEO, M&M Direct, Nick Lansley, Head of Innovation and R&D, Tesco and John Hinchcliffe, CMO, N Brown Group. We’d decided beforehand that we’d avoid the blander approaches one sometimes gets at industry events and try to deal head on with some of the hard choices and real differences this Christmas. I was really pleased that they entered into this and can’t remember chuckling so much during a panel before 😉 Hats off to Steve, Nick and John.
Here’s the eminent Peter Fitzgerald of Google opening proceedings: note the Lolo colours, courtesy of ToyCamera iPhone app…
The next panel was on KPIs and featured Michael Ross of eCommera (@manross) in fine form on his pet topic – KPIs. I won’t quote some of his excellent one-liners since not only would that be ‘goal-poaching’, but because Michael’s doing an article for November’s Internet Retailing magazine and I don’t want to scoop ourselves. Watch this space.
Finally on the photo front, here’s the lab squad (or some other name) of Google engineers around to answer questions. All good fun.
I understand that the event was filmed and so – if our panel session makes it past the censor’s cuts for language, sarcasm and career-limited comments – I’ll post the link.
“With familiar System Preference functionality, Cameras allows you to manage what happens when you connect your:
* Digital camera
* iPhone
* Digital media reader
* Any photo device
In addition to launching a specific application when you connect a camera, you can also have your images download automatically. Never again spend time launching the right app or quitting apps that you didn’t want to launch.”
Review of Maturity Models::immeria::web analytics blog::Stephane Hamel – Six approaches to maturity models compared, with the aim of finding an ideal one for the Web Analytics Association. The review is a useful round-up though for anyone interested in maturity models and their applicability.
Apple Wants To Build A PayPal Killer, Say Wall Street Gossips (AAPL, EBAY) – This makes immense sense to me. iPhone users are used to their iTunes app and make micropayments ($0.79, say, for a tune up to £20 for an app and £100 for their .mac account…). In the absence of a PayPal app on the iPhone (invoked how? with no multitasking and clunky hand-shaking between apps…?) this would make sense.
Certainly it’s no more onerous than Google Checkout and would be better integrated.
I was really honoured to be asked to keynote at Econsultancy’s 2009 FODM in June 2009. I’d spoken before and found the audience to be tough but receptive. It’s one of the more difficult speaking gigs of the year, I find, and there’s always a pressure to perform well (and Ashley commenting that there’s “no pressure” of course just makes it worse… 😉 ). At least this year he didn’t promise I’d be “funny” (a throwaway remark that gave me my first night of lost sleep in 10 years as I imagined that I’d been forced to perform a standup routine at the Comedy Club without a script! Wah).
Anyway, the event was held at the rather spectacular Congress Hall and upon entering I realised both that is was a great presentation venue, and that 350 marketers is quite some audience 😉
There were some spectacular and energetic speakers (Jonathan MacDonald in particular), and two sessions that interested me in particular on digital publishing and ecommerce in retail.
The presentation went well and I used the time to reprise themes from previous FODM presentations, wander into the realms of Augmented Reality, build on some KPI discussions I’d been having with Michael “KPI” Ross and finally introduce the “Obama-Preedy Pricing Principle” (the result of a beer-supported discussion with Tony Preedy on how discounts and promotions should be related to a specific place, time and – increasingly – appropriate behaviours). Maybe it should have been the Pavlov-Preedy Principle??
June Lawlor, who was director of womenswear, accessories and beauty at House of Fraser, and Colin Porter, who was commercial director at the department store, will join Crombie as joint managing directors.
The duo plan to revamp the brand, focusing on its heritage and on producing classics with a twist. They also plan to expand Crombie’s network of standalone stores, concessions and its website.
Songbird – Open Source Music Player – iTunes alternative that – w00t – plays FLAC (lossless audio format) files. Will play at high definition (24bit/96Mhz) and so with an external DAC makes your mac the storage and source “heart” of a digital uber-hifi system.
Blue Circle Audio, Inc. – The USB Thingee HO – DAC and pre-amp. Rave reviews, characterful (unique) construction and a fifth of the price of the Benchmark DAC 1 PRE…
Computer Audio for the Audiophile | Home Entertainment – Outboard DAC review and roundup of audiophile-grade audio playback from a Mac. Now the question is how to get 96Khz audio into iTunes in the first place. Oh, and getting a cheaper DAC – $4k isn’t really ‘audiophile’ – it’s “divorce” 😉
