buzznovation

Fine Dining with Mobile Devices

My pal Linda Stone has written a very interesting blog post over on the Huffington Post, e.g. Fine Dining with Mobile Devices.

I am a big fan of Linda and have talked to her over her wonderful kitchen island about her theories on “cpa” e.g. Continuous Partial Attention.

I don’t just think, I know she is on to something.

Last night I was at a lovely dinner party and I realized that I had set my iPhone out on the table. I think my justification was that there was one person who had been invited, who was late, and I wanted to be sure not to miss a call as to directions, etc.

I easily could have put the phone away, but instead left it out, just in case I didn’t miss something. Who knows what that something might be.

And while I doubt that it didn’t distract me from the conversation at the table, now that I think about it, I was a bit of a jerk not to put the phone in my coat pocket, turn it off, and just enjoy the good friends and good conversation at the table.

I know that Linda is working on turning her ideas into a great book. When it’s published I am sure it will be a best seller, and I will be an early buyer.

 

A Good Year...part 2

There was a very funny part of the movie that I meant to also comment on.

Early in the movie you hear the signature ring of the Palm Treo. About 4 people around me, and yours truly were immediately scrambling to turn off their phones until they realized that the ringing was come from the screen.

I am sure we all felt a little like geek jerks, but were all also happy to make sure that our phones were off!

My pal Andrew Carton has commented on his Treonaut’s blog about the product placement, which was fun to both see and read about.

John Battelle at The Blog Business Summit

“Search Engines are the new distributors of attention.”

I just had lunch with John Battelle and now I am listening to his presentation. His idea above really resonated with me. As we often have people download ActiveWords because of “Google”. I always reach out and asked them what were they looking for, and routinely they have no clue.

The issue then becomes what key words to buy, or how in the world to leverage this connection. To date only ideas, but no definitive conclusions.

More ideas from John:

“Let customers tell you how to build it.”

About FM

Federated Media's business proposition is below… 

How to support independent authors and sites, and market in conversation

“Bundle an ecology of quality sites together-10–30 per category”

Aggregate high quality audiences in the tens of millions, adviews in the hundreds of millions.

Authors gain access to expensive publishing services (technology, credit/collections, sales, business development)

Marketers gain efficient and appropriate access to robust, passionate conversations and new approaches to joining them.

Reporting, services, analysis for Marketer and Author.

The core driver of our business value is our relationship with site creators, we call them authors, and the value they create through their work.

We cultivate that relationship by bringing them revenue, or course, but although publishing services like Business development and technical support, and a membership approach.

FM differentials …

100 sites

more than 750 million ad impressions

excellent audience demographics

monthly booked business in the seven figures

Sales force of 15

Engineering staff of 4

author services staff of 4

nearly 1500 advertisers…

I almost got all his info from his slides….

I need to go look at his site vis a vis advertising ActiveWords, who knows…

 

 

 

 

Shuffling...off to Buffalo...

When I first saw the Apple Shuffle, I thought to myself, who would bother. Why would you bother with say 512 Megs, when you could buy a real iPod for a couple hundred bucks more. I also thought to myself that without a screen to read the Shuffle was doomed. A while later I realized that I couldn’t read the screens on the little flash drive MP3 players that I had seen, so a screen wasn’t a big deal.

I then realized that when I was traveling, that smaller and lighter was a much better idea.

Trying to buy one was another matter. I was in Seattle when I got the urge, and to quote my friend Doc Searls, “invention” became “the mother of necessity”. I made three trips to one Apple store, and three trips to another. No luck, finally I got smart, and went in, found a nice young woman and begged my way onto the Shuffle will call list. Two days later I got the call, tried to pay using my Visa card. No luck, I was given 50 minutes to show up as they had a long list of people standing in the call list line.

I hustled over and bought a couple. Gave one to my friend’s wife who had put up with me for ten days.  She was thrilled. We loaded them up with songs and I haven’t looked back. I have flown on three different flights since. Music has been sensational, no issue about power, and the Shuffle fits in the same case that came with my Etymotic ER-6is.

I heard from someone that Apple has sold 2 million of them since their release. I am surprised frankly they haven’t sold more. Probably because they can’t supply the demand. Dynamite little device. Right now I am sitting in an airport listening to Norah Jones, oblivious to the noise around me, and sipping WiFi from the Crown Room.

Too bad there isn’t a cocktail waitress nearby…and the case for my ER-6is holds both the earbuds and the Shuffle. It doesn’t get much better.

Stop the presses...

I have blogged and ranted about Skype!. I have also told anyone who would listen that I had broken the code as to how to use an Ety-Com plus this $3.99 plug from Radio Shack to plug into my ThinkPad and have great fidelity.

A bunch of smart people have listen to me, nodded appropriately and perhaps concluded that I actually knew what I was talking about.

At DemoMobile I told my good friend Shel Israel how I had figure it all out and he then wrote about it in his conferenza newsletter.

Unfortunately he erred slightly in his retelling my tech triumphs. So I quickly pointed out his error. He then corrected it, and Chris Herrot promptly pointed out that I only had things half right, which is 50% better than my normal batting average.

Chris noted that:

Actually, Buzz is only half right. The Radio Shack adapter he mentions allows the earphone part of the headset to work with Skype. You must still talk into the microphone built into your PC. If you want to use the microphone in the headset you need something like the GE HO97950 Audio Hub that plugs into both the green and red jacks on your PC.

Some day I will publish the circuit on my blog – it’s really very simple. (Remember the Farallon adaptor that allowed Appletalk to work over ordinary phone wiring? They made a lot of money on that sucker and never could understand why Apple didn’t build it that way from the beginning.

p.s. What I have now is working great, but Chris knows his stuff, and I just ordered the GE part as Skype is way to cool to not do it right. The GE part is about $8 at a couple of sites, so my investment in making it work right will double, but think about the fun.