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Empire Avenue: The Echo Chamber of Commerce?

May 3, 2011 By 2 Comments

Whenever you ask someone to think of stock trading, they always picture this image: men acting frantically with pieces of paper in one hand and a phone in the other while being surrounded by a gazillion screens displaying the latest risers and fallers.

The truth is that floor traders are threatened with extinction as computerized trading has increasingly replaced them. Computers don’t give a damn about the long-term outlook of a stock or a portfolio, but are programmed to react to minute price changes in microseconds. Systematic trading netted a guy like Dr. Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies a whopping $2.8 billion in 2008.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a rant against systematic trading. In fact, now there’s a way to relive the old days of trading. Sort of.

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Transavia’s Crowdsourcing Campaign Falls Flat

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Dutch airline Transavia held an online contest to determine their new slogan. The campaign was wildly successful with over 100,000 submissions. Some of the entries were even printed onto billboard ads.

A panel of judges determined the top entries and the eventual winner. This is where the campaign fell flat. The entries that were chosen as best entries sucked. They lacked edginess and creativity (some slogans had already been used by other airlines). The winning slogan was “That makes you happy”. That’s not just bad, it’s pathetic.

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Why The Hell Are You Following Me?

March 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You’re sitting at a table in a restaurant with a friend. You’re talking about cars and you mention the new BMW you just leased. A car salesman happens to walk past as you mention the word BMW. He grabs a chair and joins your table.

The two of you continue your conversation and after a while, the car salesman leaves the table.

That was a stupid scenario and would—hopefully—never happen in real life, but on Twitter, it happens all the fucking time. Car dealerships, affiliate marketers, online shops, those pesky “gurus”… They start following you after you’ve mentioned a keyword they’re targeting and they unfollow you once they realize you can’t be arsed to follow them back. The fact that the process is often automated makes it look completely stupid. After I reviewed the Audi A1 last year, an Audi dealership from Florida started following me on Twitter.

It’s good to monitor conversations that are related to your brand, your market or your niche, but please include a human being and human interaction in the process so you won’t look like a complete idiot.

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A Flashy Future For Mobile

March 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This post is inspired by a presentation by Adobe’s Anup Murarka at South by South West. He talked about the future of Adobe Flash for the mobile platform. I’ll cover some of the highlights from Anup’s presentation but will put the topic in a different perspective, namely that of the mobile network operators.

Currently, 98% of desktop computers support Flash, but not even a tenth of mobile phones has Flash support. This is expected to change dramatically over the next couple of years though.

Smartphones are getting better, not only in capabilities, but also in hardware quality. Similar to desktops, notebooks and netbooks, a growing number of smartphones will also boast multi-core processors and graphics processors that can serve up rich media.

Adobe’s new version of Flash—version 10.1—will be cross-platform. Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, you name it—all will be supported by Flash 10.1.

Adobe expects to get around 10% of mobile penetration for Flash this year, but expect to grow that number to over 50% by the end of 2012.

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Your Private Parts Are Also My Private Parts

February 2, 2010 By 5 Comments

A few weeks back, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “sharing is the [new] social norm” these days following changes to Facebook’s privacy settings. This is partly true and—as I alluded to in The Social Impact Of Social Media—social media has allowed people to be more open and connect with the people and topics that matter to them.

However, whatever matters to person A might not matter to person B. Sharing information doesn’t imply sharing relevance. Privacy is a matter of context, something that is judged on a semantic scale. Facebook doesn’t control the social norm. We do.

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