Western Digital are tapping into a very nice niche in external hard drives - the media storage. Most of us have tons of playable content on their drives - I personally manage a huge collection of movies, mostly of my son’s everyday wonderful new surprises. But playing them on a big TV screen is a pain in the neck. Since I switched to Mac, I’m thinking of buying a DVI to Composite or SCART adapter in order to play all those movies on my TV screen. However, freezing one PC in front of the TV set is not a good idea, especially when you have work to do and you mother wants to see her grandson’s movies. So this device, allowing to play non-DRM content from any external USB drive is an excellent solution for me…

However, I miss the recording… It would have been a great idea to have such device acting as a PVR too. Nevertheless, with a little more than 100 USD price tag (but without HDD) it’s a good pick for the holiday gift list:

But it would seem that WD has realized that lots of people are storing gigs and gigs of media on their drives without an easy way to go from storing said media on an external drive to watching that movie on a big screen TV. Enter the WD TV HD Media Player, whose sole goal is to make that happen.

WD TV HD Media player, OMG - MacUser

Last week Google announced a new set of gadgets for Gmail Labs that offer integration with Docs and Google Calendar. But perhaps most exciting (and under-emphasized at the time) was the introduction of support for third party gadgets, giving users the chance to add features to Gmail beyond what Google offers.

One of the first developers to take advantage of the new feature is Remember The Milk

Gmail’s New Gadget Support Lets You Remember The Milk

According to the mail, Plaxo will remain an “…independent brand, organization and entity”. While everything sounds fine, I’m starting to ask myself what are the reason for this deal.

Steven Levitt: the Freakonomics of inner-city gangs:
Steve Levitt - Why You Can’t Trust Economists:

It’s even rarer that I see software that I know will change the world my sons live in…While watching the demo I realized the way I look at the world was about to change. While listening to Wong I noticed a tear running down my face. It’s been a long while since Microsoft did something that had an emotional impact on me like that.

My guess: Online Office, something visually much better than Google Apps. It would have sense in the context of Microsoft’s offer to Yahoo.

Gosh, I hope that one will be better than Vista…

1. What is the place of the traditional marketing in the changing new reality?

First of all, in my humble opinion, there are no such things as ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ marketing. Being more a craftsman work, marketing is a set of rules, tools and approaches to resolve the problems in the product-customer relationship. Every marketing professional with a broad vision has the opportunity to express himself using this broad range of solutions that marketing science has built over the years. However, we should not perceive any of those tools and rules as a one of God’s Commandments on Marketing. Technology, being the most rapidly changing element in our environment, has created the biggest challenge since ever commerce exists – the one-to-one relationship opportunity between sellers and buyers. This dramatic shift is changing how marketing is applied, not the marketing science itself. We’re facing new opportunities and threats in terms of research, segmentation, differentiation, positioning and communication of our products and services, but we’re not challenging the basic rules of marketing. So, at the end, my answer is – marketing has a growing and already overwhelming role in the new market reality.

2. Communication and communicating has changed. What are major new opportunities and treats?

Technological advance has created new ways and means of communication which are aimed at the individual. As a consequence marcom is facing rapid transformation from a mass to an individual model – both in terms of media mix and messages. Research then segmentation, then targeting are rapidly evolving into the profiling of the individual. From the customers’ point of view, Internet, Social Networks, Blogging and all other forms of social connectivity, personal expression and sharing have dramatically changed how sellers and customers interact. Now the voice of the unhappy is much stronger and the discontent is spreading at flu-like, viral models. We’re facing a radical fragmentation of media in terms of audience. Traditional communication is doomed if not ready to adapt to those challenges. The fragmentation of the audience has created a huge number of micro-groups, tiny networks of interest. Determining the stakeholders and focusing on how to create mutually beneficial relationship with them, transforming them into evangelists of your product – that will be the biggest challenge of marcom professionals in the upcoming years. A good success story is Apple’s road to success, especially with the launch of iPhone.

3. How the traditional media should adapt to fit the changes?

They are already adapting. It’s just a question of time that business models of media will change. IPТV, Video on Demand (VoD), time and place-shifting devices such as TiVo are completely reshaping the TV model – the King of Advertising - 30” spot – is slowly dying. RSS, social networks, social bookmarking, blogs and civic journalism are reshaping the world of newspapers and magazines. Sharing information has transformed the society into an ‘instant news, instant comment’ model. Corporate interests that were used to control and moderate media are losing its grip over news monopoly. The omnipresence of Internet on all interactive devices – PC, handhelds, TV, Set-top-boxes (STB), mobile phones – is creating a brand new type of media services – news aggregators (aggregating several flows of information into a single pipe), optimization and filtering news services (to reshape the pipe in terms of interests and type of device used). Simply broadcasting radio on the Internet is not interesting anymore – new models of personalizing streams according to tastes are the most successful ones (such as www.pandora.com, www.last.fm, www.soundpedia.com). At the end media will generate content for the individual, accumulating more and more information on his usage, buying and interest behavior. As content creators, media will have to seek reliable and accessible personal channels of distribution, as well as completely new business models in terms of marketing communications.

4. How the relationship brand-person evolves?

It will deepen. Brands are emotional expression of our needs and the enormous amount of information we use will create deeper relationships between customers and brands. Brands will evolve into a 360-degrees user experiences. Brands will be extremely dependant on stakeholders and evangelists, and communication will essentially turn into reputation management.

All interviews can be found here

According to the usual suspects, now you can 100%-unlock the iPhone using a Turbo SIM card, without depending on the version of your current carrier card. Testers say it will give you full calling, SMS and

GPRS data capabilities with any network and no extra hardware needed, since it only requires you to modify the $80 blank SIM using your own iPhone.

The hackers are claiming that this method doesn’t use card readers and it doesn’t depend on your previous card version either, so it doesn’t matter if it is a V1, V2 or V3. All of them will work fine.

While the Turbo SIM-based method is not software-only, it seems simple and cheap enough for anyone to follow.

However, to save you any potential pain we will test it here as soon as we get our Turbo SIM cards —which are about to arrive. We will give you a full report on our results as soon as we try it.

Well, I’m not sure how this breakthrough will affect Apple/AT&T relationship, but personally I enjoy the overall hacking effort that has been made - there’s no walled garden that can be protected for a long time. Too much emphasis on closing the content into a single network has never been a long-lasting strategy.