The Upper Westside Journal

Leland's Huge Talk about Android, Twitter and Mobile User Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:07:00 +0000

I just saw a great presentation by @Leland at Huge tonight in a UPA series event called "Put your iPhone down! A Discussion About the State of Mobile Services."

This was the first talk I've been to that looks beyond the iPhone in terms of user experience, and there were some key points that will become clearer as we approach 2010 and since there will be a lot of new android devices in market on sprint, t-mobile and verizon.

Leland Rechis was impressive for two reasons:
1) He worked with Twitter in Japan, which is where they've done intensive mobile testing, and twitter is a platform agnostic service, which treats SMS, Mobile Web and Native Apps all as viable channels for interaction on mobile
2) He worked at Google on the development of the Android platform, which is the most open platform for OS development

Leland explained that Apple has created an architecture that deals very well on AT&T's network, because iPhone economizes energy and data usage by putting activities into app silos. However, Apple pre-sets the activities you can initiate for their apps. The best mobile experience would enable you to take a photo and pull up whichever service has the capability to post. Android can generically say 'share' and pull up any application on the phone that has sharing capabilities (email, MMS, twitter app, facebook, tumblr etc.).

iPhone instead picks static features that you might want to use, e.g. for photos you get 1) email, 2) assign to a contact, 3) use as wallpaper. Android does not pre-bake these features, it offers 'intents' which means anywhere within any application on Android it is possible to call up an activity, rather than fully load up another app. That really makes the picture of the three suggested options of what to do with a photo on iPhone look pretty silly.

I think it's possible that the next wave of mobile behavior will be that the most popular apps from iPhones will make their way to Android, but then those popular apps will be addressable in standard apps like the camera, video player, email, and the mobile browser.

I also think that the framework for Android that Leland explained makes content potentially more viral than it has been on the iPhone 1,2, and 3.0 OS because getting to your preferred apps faster means more sharing of photos, videos and links.

I asked Leland what's next for HTML 5 after Geo-Location, and he said it's 'app store' and clarified, 'not THE app store, but application data storage' for the mobile browser, which is why Apple and Google who initially worked together in their contribution to the webkit standard mobile browser are now competing to create the fastest and best JavaScript engines.

What's Leland's favorite Android app? He seemed pretty fond of Twidget Lite which from a design standpoint is breakthrough, it offers today what the Motorola Cliq seems to be promising, which is an interface where the widget provides information but does not take up the whole screen.

Over the Air Updates...kind of a big deal

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:48:00 +0000

I'm posting an update to my Business Insider piece in July which outlined how subsidies could set China's mobile market on fire, with the launch of Android oPhones on China Mobile.

There are not many weaknesses to combat iPhone world domination. The longer iPhones are on the market and people get used to touch screens, we are left with three glaring issues.

Great, cloud-based music players
Great, cloud-based push-email providers
FOTA or Firmware Over the Air Updates

I had forgotten about #3. Since I've had iPhones for my last 3 phones, I had forgotten that over the air updates were even possible, since Apple does not support them. Although my music purchasing has migrated exclusively to mobile, I've resigned myself to side-loading software updates, via iTunes.

However, I read two corporate posts from Red Bend today, the first of which states that their FOTA software will be shipping with Android phones because of their partnership with Borqs in China so that software upgrades from China Mobile will come over the air. The second post gave background on mobile software updates in general and how Apple has made software upgrades a strategic advantage, at least over RIM and Windows mobile in the US.

Apple however has not made any statements about over the air upgrades. Consider that right now effectively no one uses iTunes in China, and grey iPhones do not even have iTunes or the App store. If Androids enter the market with over the air software updates and iPhones launch with their usual sideloading updates iPhones may not look so cool by comparison. If the user does not have a laptop, they may be in trouble, as their company may not allow an 80mb iTunes download during work hours or at all on a work computer, and maybe mom and dad's computer isn't where you want to back up all of your pics and other mobile media.

Over the Air updates... that's kind of a big deal. The link directly to the left there is for Anyclip beta users only...email me for an invite, as I have 1! Youtube clip below for everyone else :)

Note: I didn't mention multi-tasking as a weakness. I only see that as a short term weakness for Apple. You can quasi-multitask while you iPod is on, I think it's just a matter of time before apple enables that OS enhancement both for it's own and 3rd party apps.

Share Ferris!

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Movies are universally enjoyed, but not universally remembered. Yet we just love quoting movies. Last week I held a brainstorming session at New Work City to explore how movie quoting could be made shareable. The goal is to use the web so that the effort made quoting movies can more enjoyable, especially for those who have not seen the movie or don't remember the quotes. There were two types of ideas, those that made it easy to share, and those that built on the enjoyment of movie references.

The state of quotable media on the web:
Our favorite day-to-day video sites, youtube and hulu have not developed their search algorithms to be narrow enough to catch quotes effectively. Look on Hulu for SNL clips and you'll notice that you get lots of garbage when you type in a sentence you heard in a skit. Movies do not even have real live database, all we have is curated quotes on IMDB, and a cottage industry of movie fans who curate sites like killerclips.com and others that find the best clips amongst a small set of top movies.

Making it easier to find and share movie clips as you remember them: Many existing sites are just begging to incorporate a useful movie quote API that would enhance their ability to pull content and make it shareable:

1) Shazam

Shazam Integration so you can speak a quote into your phone and get back the clip to tweet.

2) Facebook

Create a Facebook app that can use predictive text to pull movie clips based on what you're looking to post or comment on your friends' walls.

3) Instant Messaging, meebo, trillian, digsby, gtalk, y!, AIM and Skype

The Shazam, Facebook and Instant Messaging examples require an API where you can pull on the fly clips from the whole movies, not just a canned clip arbitrarily posted as a well known funny scene.

One problem with a curated model where only the funniest clips are made available is that there's no incentive to make the whole movie available. The NYT arranged John Hughes movie quotes last week as a memorial, but there's not enough room and these cannot be shared in such a way that they can handle the real time desire for incorporating quotes into web communication. I'm not looking for Tom Cruise's clips in Risky Business, I want to be able to pull Bronson Pinchot Curtis Armstrong and Joe Pantoliano talking about 'wonder woman', the 'trig midterm', or 'I can't go $250 for the artsy fartsy thing', respectively.

That has been the trap we fell into with Wikipedia and IMDB offering 'best of' information repositories. But the social web has provided a new mechanism for movies to enter the dialog. Facebook and Twitter has enabled accounts and fan pages that are truly connected to actors. We should be able to call out to those actors, and they should be able to respond to us in context.

We need a company with a higher purpose. Someone needs to do the groundwork that enables an agnostic catalog of movies tagged in a way that users can generate clips on the fly for their own purpose. For those of us who have seen the canon of hilarious movies more than 10x a piece (I round down to save face) it is not the obvious, canned clips that we want to share.

Enhanced engagement:

1) Automate the Actors on Facebook and Twitter

Automate a way for celebrities I fan or follow to chat back in my conversations with a verified, authoritative, "pardon me guys" comment and associated clip. Say, I'm a fan of Bill Murray on Facebook and I say to a fellow looper 'There won't be any money, but on your deathbed, you'll receive total consciousness' and tag my comment #clip I'll summon the Bill Murray fan page to reply within the thread: 'Which is nice' and the associated video clip from Caddy Shack.

2) Power-up Bloggers, and Traditional Media

Writers could use movie quotes to enhance their writing by enabling a much shorter description of how they see their story about some event happening now to be reminiscent of a movie. If any of the semantic blog services like Zemanta, (pictured below) OpenCalais, Disqus, Apture, or firefox plugins Glue or Juice were to incorporate a useful movie quote search API, they could do a better job than just putting stock photos or links to IMDB, which is generally what they do now.

There are of course two business models here - the studios can get involved for DVD releases where they create buzz around the time when DVD's are about to hit retail, netflix and amazon. And there's an unlimited time period when adverters could sponsor movie quote clips just like they currently sponsor music mixtapes in apps like Pandora. If a contextual advertising engine like Adbrite, AdRoll, Kontera or Vibrant media integrated a movie quote search API, sponsoring clips could be done with only a bit more effort than buying keywords.

If you have the means, I highly recommend...

Inspired By 'IB' references on Twitter

Let twitter users generate IB (inspired by) mentions, maybe use the new RT API to make this happen. If you liked Obama's recent opinion piece in the NYT on healthcare you could comment 'I think you're right', but wouldn't it be more powerful to use a clip from the 35 year old Mel Brooks classic Blazing Saddles? There's a scene when all of the people named Johnson from Rock Ridge rally to fight for their town, so why not tweet " Obama is right! http://bit.ly/13BFfc IB Blazing Saddles http://www.splicd.com/xQY5qoolark/414/443 "

That example above may sound complicated, but our appetite for using movies as a reference to our collective psyche get much more convoluted, take this beautiful mashup of Ferris Bueller and Fight Club that @robertgorell sent me as part of the brainstorm last week from Kottke.org.

Movies are not yet useful on the web, and the dynamic movie quote search API is what we need to merge the Silver and LED screens.

Share Ferris!

This Guy, Deserves a Party - John Hughes Memorial Web Service Brainstorm

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:27:00 +0000

Event: 6:30pm, Thursday August 13th

Title: John Hughes Memorial Web Services - Thursday Night Brainstorm
Location: New Work City, 200 Varick Street, NY NY

If you're like me you were saddened by the loss of John Hughes last Thursday. You may also have noticed that unlike the loss of Michael Jackson, which prompts people to make videos of themselves moonwalking, John Hughes inspires a particular type of web conversation as well. At least from my personal streams, there were more quotes on Twitter and longer wall strokes on Facebook / Friendfeed than for any other weekend on web record. But who's making this experience better, and who's using all this data to make things more fun for all of these fans?

I have some interesting ideas on how to make the American tradition of quoting everything you can remember from John Hughes' movies even more fun. There is a new generation of viewers that need to be inspired in the way that Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club and Planes Trains and Automobiles did inspired us. There's a new generation of movies, like Superbad, and though the angst may be the same, we need a better way to share the feeling. And I think we can offer the semantic recognition to turn the whole conversation into a game with a beginning and an end.

However, unlike many web services that are built in private, "....with the water running all day..." with the hope of extracting money, this should be a feature driven experiment that does more to unlock clips and give context and broader share-ability and meaning to why we continually bring back those famous scenes in our daily lives, and create a party around it. Because when I think of John Hughes, I hear the echo of Lisa from Weird Science, 'This guy, deserves a party'.

I'm planning to be at New Work City this Thursday 8/13 starting at 6:30pm and use all available whiteboards and discussion space to share our ideas. If it goes well we might use livestream/twitcam to share with the rest of the world. Maybe those who are building services to enable a new way of automating content sharing, especially if they are doing it for movies, will take notice.

You can bring your magazine clippings, and you can wear a bra and your head, but come!

"Do you know if we played by the rules right now we'd be in Gym?"

Fake Push Notifications, infinitely more fun

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:13:00 +0000

What's more fun than a Fake Retweet? The Fake Push Notification of course.

Follow these easy steps.

1) You see a friend of yours on Foursquare check in and it says
"Tom L @ [off the grid] ...checked in, but hiding their whereabouts!"

2) Text them IMMEDIATELY saying:

"Foursquare: Congratulations! You've unlocked a special Douchebadge! We know you're at Cipriani and we're telling everyone!!"

or how about...

"Foursquare: Since you're so close to Janet B. at Fette Sau she says "Come over and buy me a drink and my next "check-in" is at your place!"

It's basically impossible to tell the difference between a text and a push notification when it comes to your homescreen, so have fun. Of course it works better if they don't have your number programmed in their phone.

It's been a while since my last post, because I was working on a post about China Mobile that went up on the business insider recently, thanks @fromedome. Also, I never put up the video I received via email from Sarah Lacy after the Beijing trip. I wasn't sure if this video was for public consumption, but the only people who'd mind are Yan and I. Thanks @sarahcuda !

...And I've decided I'm not renaming my blog, since I still live on the west side. So, I don't have to crowdsource a new blog name, because there is no lower west side, but if you'd like to comment with clever ideas feel free.

Twitter bump: Failwhale sightings on land prompt much conversation

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:04:00 +0000

Last August I was struck by how many comments Tara Hunt got when she took a picture of herself in her Failwhale T-Shirt. That was 2008 when twitter was for geeks.

Now it's 2009 and on a quiet March evening in London Imogen Heap who is best known for "Let Go"did the same thing with 3x times as many comments in a short period of time. I'm also pretty sure that very few of her 57,939 followers are considered 'in the tech industry'. She racked up 7,982 views to her Twitpic page, which means that 7,982 people clicked from seeing Imogen Heap tweet that she uploaded a picture. And then 23 people could not help but comment about her and the Failwhale she was wearing.

Facebook is making products talk too - I enabled Netflix with Facebook connect today, rated one movie, Midnight Run from 1988 and already I've had 3 comments in 1/2 hour

Here are all Imogen's comments from Twitpic

ginaaaxmarieee on March 27, 2009

hahaha. i love the fail whale too. walk on the streets with that shirt! (:

kimmieeee on March 27, 2009

This is so cute!

davidshepherd on March 27, 2009

Save the whale, its eyes its nose its tail... (John Shuttleworth)

lesliemmuller on March 27, 2009

Immie, I think you have my pajama bottoms--they look better on you. . !

ben_rio on March 27, 2009

That goes quite well actually. Very Sunday morning. Chariots of fire inspirational music, run for the kettle!

Andymy on March 27, 2009

Hehehe Ultra cooooool ^_^

witchlostintime on March 27, 2009

I wish I looked that good mid pj changeover! Loving it!

tec5x5 on March 27, 2009

Nice i dont where pjs i just sleep in my jeans

anonymousangel on March 27, 2009

sweet! lovin the 'do.

whereamigoing on March 27, 2009

You look great,this pic is so cool.

yukimi on March 27, 2009

awww I love the failwhale too! but don't make it a pj! I would happily walk around with one of these shirts! so lovely!!!

lindsayylou on March 27, 2009

Loooovve it!!!

lizzy1e on March 27, 2009

So coooool! Got that error yesterday and thought it was such a cute pic. :D

HeyLetsPogo on March 27, 2009

The t-shirts are for sale here: http://www.zazzle.com/failwhale. And I absolutely agree - you look fab, Immi :)

desvai on March 27, 2009

so cute, i want one!

truett on March 27, 2009

jealousssssssssss

kristwhy on March 27, 2009

it's awesome, you're beautiful as is your music

SidifromDC on March 27, 2009

Imogen...it's beautiful!

LiaisonOnEtsy on March 27, 2009

Who is the vendor Imogen? Where'd you get it??

Talklikeazombie on March 27, 2009

Awesome! And badass pjs Immi xD

georgiaelizabee on March 27, 2009

Win! (:

omnamaste on March 27, 2009

dude. we wants.

uberlab on March 27, 2009

cuuuute :) personally think the "fixing it now cat" was cuter tho

lexi_c on March 27, 2009

I love the shirt! And I love your hair! My goodness, you are gorgeous! :D

"Hey, Ivanka Trump" says Ruben Blades, "Panama it will never leave you"

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:29:00 +0000

It is next to impossible to find on the internet, but if you have been in a cab lately Ruben Blades has recommended you visit Panama in the Panama Tourism commercials on NY10taxi TV.

Thanks to John Carney at The Business Insider in his pickup of Latin Business Chronicle Ivanka Trump is now forever linked in his post "Weirdly Smart Ivanka Trump Says its Time to Party in Panama". So now in terms of the web, we're sure that Panama will never leave her.

Unfortunately you cannot find the video of Ruben Blades' commercial anywhere on the web, but it is begging for a mashup and fake summit, romance or otherwise that involves Ruben Blades salsa singing and dancing and courting his newest, all-business spokeswoman, Ivanka Trump. There are, if you must look, much less interesting and lower production quality videos of panama on Youtube and on panama tourism sites.

The commercial is campy and says there are so many birds that you could have an air traffic controller pushing feathers in the rainforest. In the video a bird poops on the air traffic controller's shoulder and Ruben Blades says 'Get that man a hat' (would love to add a link here, BBDO, Ruben?).

Ruben, I must ask you...now that Ivanka Trump is saying that Panama's Real Estate is a bright shining light in her portfolio, doesn't she deserve a hat too?

Pillow Talk with Vlingo and Fennec

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Remember this rumor on Gizmodo?

There's a lot of fear that the execution wouldn't work because typing could suck, which is why we were graced with the 'MacWheel' on the Onion News Network recently. You can learn a lot from a spoof, and the MacWheel rightly pointed out that we're not ready yet for touch screen computers, both in terms of usability and popular disposition. But touchscreen netbooks are not far away; the technology is ready, the marketing use cases are not.

There is hope today, in the form of two new browsers. One is a mobile browser that deals well with limited real estate and touch screens, Fennec from Mozilla, and the other, which is much more groundbreaking to me, is vlingo. Vlingo is a 'browser' of sorts but it's really just a layer of control to the web that uses voice to navigate. Here is the AppVee review of Vlingo if you haven't used the app already.
I wasn't much into voice controls, especially in public. What's good about vlingo's interface is that it only uses voice to suggest and pre-populate words so that you can get most of the way there to a search or status update or even a voice dial. You can then use the touch screen to edit what you've said like the google voice search application.

Although this extra layer of voice control does not take away the need for a browser, the voice-to-text interface makes voice the center of your world and lets you input information in a variety of modes.
It's not a surprise that it made TechCrunch's top ten iPhone apps of 2008. There are lots of voice to text companies, SpinVox who's done something similar in the EU as well, and then there's Yap, Voodoovox, Jott and PhoneTag. When touch screen netbooks take off however, it will be interesting to see if vlingo and or these other companies take off with them.

I said in a previous post about ChaCha that I would be embarrassed to use a voice application out in public, but I'm quite comfortable talking to inanimate objects in my house. In fact, if I'm folding my laundry, I'd much rather use voice and then tap a few corrections rather than be stuck walking back and forth to a desktop and finding the typing position at an upright computer or carry around an awkwardly folding laptop.

I think that trend towards nice flat netbooks will soon see the use of vlingo, or like apps working overtime as people sitting in bed start talking out searches and quick notes and editing them before sending them out. Here in an UWS studio, talking is the perfect way to control my media. I love and would not trade my AirMouse + iMac combo, but after a while trying to control Hulu from across the room with my iPhone starts to feel like archery.

With vlingo + netbook, or vlingo + TV there's less typing and that comes much much closer to a universal remote. Most of the work will be about selecting your results and how and where to share the information you have readied for public, private or semi-private consumption.

And this is all using language, there are even voice tools for humming commands, like this drawing done by Ze Frank.

Try the voice drawing tool for yourself...

Since you're saving lots of keystrokes using vlingo, you can now forget those silly keyboard shortcuts. If vlingo brought you to Fennec, you could replace keyboard shortcuts like 'cut' with a little scissor icon and forget about your mouse. Fennec then offers more touchscreen gestures like dragging the screen left or right give you the ability to share, email or browse to deeper content.

The picture below shows Fennec from Mozilla, which has a menu with star, page back and page forward that appear only when you wipe the screen to the left. You'd see your tabs if you wiped the other way, right. Right now the iPhone's Safari slows down your browsing behavior on mobile in the same way that IE did on the desktops in the pre-tab world.

With easy to get to tabs, and the view to what other tabs are open you can multi-task on a smaller screen more easily.

I'm not sure on the form factor, but the new idea from a google engineer could test well - the NIMble looks like a strong prototype for the touch screen, but voice could really make it interesting.

I say voice is the new frontier in technology precisely because it has not yet been made fun of to my knowledge on any comedy show. What should be a much more difficult technological advance, potentially the last piece of the information logistics puzzle would be to give the screen a 3rd dimension, so that what we say could come in as holograms like we saw in the minority report in 2002.

But that has already been spoofed here in a new episode of Lazer Cats on this week's Saturday Night Live. (click through to skip to this spot in the video)

The Reading Rainbow Guy's Answer to the Kindle...

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:09:00 +0000

When I come out of the subway and see this poster, the first thing I think of is, 'She needs her peripheral vision.'

She looks like a lady I know. If I didn't know her, she'd be the lady....I didn't know. She's chopping broccoli...
(click thru to skip the long skit intro)

Then I think, 'She'll need mittens because she shouldn't be practicing cooking with these things on.' 'Her face should look like she's saying please don't think i'm a ditz for using this to watch a cooking show.'

Yes, many things are wrong with this picture. I tried to sympathize with the 'my view' makers (I had to think about the name even longer - meeevooh?). I finally realized the intended customer. YES! It's LeVar Burton!! You know, the reading rainbow guy. Yeah, he wore one of these later on in his career if I remember correctly.

Then I became angry, because I got the Reading Rainbow song in my head. I adapted it for the ad, 'Take a look! It's not a book, it's myyyyyyyyvieeeeeeeeeew!!! STOP. Just stop and call this an iSee and everyone would get it.

But since they didn't call it an iSee I kept with the LeVar Burton ad campaign...later on in his career they called him Lt. Commander Georgi LaForge.

I think you need to not segment your audience too much too fast, the tag line, on this poster was 'myvu is COOKING SHOWS.' That's a leap that I'm not ready for, it's not a teaser, and unless I go home and look at the website. Oh and I see this guy, and now I'm thinking Oakley makes these things. I'm completely in the dark. But the copy helps...

This looks like groundbreaking technology, but tell me how many people have any idea that this is for an iPhone or iPod?

Wouldn't a better ad be, 'Who wants to carry around a Kindle?' and show a picture of LeVar LaForge?

The TV commercials would be him singing in the reading rainbow style, wearing both the myvu and the star trek garb, then falling into manhole when wearing these walking around the city?

Maybe not.

If you want effective futuristic teaser ads, just look to the KGB.

The Knowledge Generation Bureau...the futuristic trekky version of ChaCha. No matter how many people know about similar services, the popular consciousness still begins on TV. Maybe if I saw MyVu on TV first, none of this would have been necessary.

Welcome to the Compensation

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:51:00 +0000

I've had this picture of John Roland sitting in my phone for the past month and wanted to write a post, but I had to get my head around the true meaning of what Compensated Spokesperson meant. When I searched to see if others had the same reaction I found this post on Lost City.

I used Camerabag to improve this iPhone photo, and that's the only difference from mine and the one on The Lost City, or others that people have sent me after I shared mine with them. They are the same damn photos, because they are all just too funny. To even keep writing here I must add some analysis, so here's what John Roland's Wilens and Baker ad for legal services means to me about our society.

John Roland's Title is part of an old media meme that I'm calling the Compensation.

The Compensation includes Robert Wagner of the Senior Lending Network. "I know you must have lots of questions" as Robert Wagner would say. As the economy crumbles advertisers see the need to stand upon rocks.

We must reverse this bad economy with trustiness, and since we no longer have Charleton Heston with us, after Robert Wagner we look to the appropriate Anchorman
for our local area, a statesman to see us through these hard times. It's kind of screwed up that we cannot somehow stop companies from pandering to our need for security and trust, and allow commercials targeted to people who cannot see that we cannot reverse our problems with reverse mortgages. However, choice wins and for now there is momentum in choosing paternal figures to hawk predatory lending products.

Maybe the Madoff scandal will turn attention to this, but hopefully not until a few more of these hilarious posters make it into the subway and commercials show up on late night tv.

There is however a really interesting social trend here though - the same trend that made my favorite Anchorman, Will Ferrell make the skit about the Coconut Bangers Ball in which Robert Goulet is selling his Rap disc. (note, this clip is not on Hulu or NBC.com!)

"The Compensation" uses gangster rap tactics to sell to people who just happen to buy Cadillacs, by saying John Roland, 'he gets paid' and you should listen to people who get paid. That's why we see real estate newspaper-thick ads dedicated to Donald Trump's real estate conferences. The Compensation, it's a rap!

Looks like I picked the wrong week to start sniffing Glue

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:05:00 +0000

Start using Glue people! NYC Startup, firefoxy, good design, new idea, very social. I can't be the only one who has reached this page over the past week, it just means there's not enough glue. Check out Glue from Adaptive Blue. Gotta have more friends on glue.

The title, if you were wondering is a take on Airplane! when Lloyd Bridges in a running gag that has him relapsing into every imaginable substance abuse, finally says he has "picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue." And if you use Glue, you'll see that 6 people visited that page on IMDB as of like right now.

Oh and they have an iPhone app.

I'll check back later on the Chow.com post to see how you're all doing. After I figure out how to say Txikito. Txikito.

UPDATE: Nice work guys, looking only a few hours later...

Welcome Back, Improv Everywhere's take on the random act of kindness at JFK

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:43:00 +0000

Mr. Charlie Todd has outdone himself with his latest scene called Welcome Back. He's getting schrewder, getting sponsored by brands while making a scene. Welcome back is part of the ongoing 'In an Absolut World' campaign for Absolut Vodka, which I'm guessing is TBWA, the same agency that did the great Be Kanye Now campaigns running one the 1,2,3 subway line a couple of months ago.

My favorite Improv Everywhere was Frozen Grand Central which I posted back in Feb, which was given tribute in a Law and Order episode that starred Robin Williams--here's the original Frozen Grand Central video.

If you want to see these updates when they happen I'd suggest you follow Charlie on Twitter

A Christmas Gift Idea from Girl Talk

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:26:00 +0000

Christmas is only a little more than a month away... Girl Talk
could easily team up with Home Depot on this one.

Monopoly Chairman says my bank needs a bailout too.

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:38:00 +0000

In this time of widespread bailouts, Mr. Uncle Pennybags, Chairman of Monopoly's board in a dignified, public outburst was overhead saying "American Express was allowed to file in as a bank, so why can't I? If you have looked at the board recently you'll know that things have gotten out of hand, I mean Baltic is $12,000 now. It's preposterous to start people out with $1,500, people are starting to substitute Vietnamese Dong for my colorful bills because there's not enough money in the plastic bins to keep up with the inflation. It's simply not good for America."

Onlookers were taken aback by the rant and said it was curious to see the tuxedo-clad Chairman speaking so negatively outside the America Depress exhibit at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, especially since moments earlier he was reeling with joy from receiving a bank dividend of $45.

Some say these concerns were really motivated by the ill-timed and expensive CGI redesign of the Monopoly board, chance and community chest cards.

Wake up the Vote - Upper West Side

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:30:00 +0000

Remember to Vote Today!!

And check out people all over the country voting today on Ground Report:
http://www.groundreport.com/election2008

If you don't vote someone else chooses for you, like in 2004:

Get the Word to the Streets

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:24:00 +0000

Politics is a collective work of art. Politicians need to elicit expression from as many voters as they can to win, yet besides organizing and voting, the place for user-generated expression has mostly been limited to parody.

What's missing from the '08 campaigns is uptake of political discussions from the general population. We know the polls, and we've seen the comedy, but discourse within our communities is limited to pleasantries. I find it difficult to argue either Obama or McCain's positions past what we hear in the debates, and from looking at their plans on their websites I'm not in much better shape.

In swing states like Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania, the issue that seems to be the Obama campaign's key differentiator is Healthcare - or at least that's what the printed talking points I was given tonight stressed.

I've never campaigned before, but after getting a call from a friend I took the C train to Lafayette and soon after I was on the phone to swing states. Prep time was short since many of the undecideds were above 65 and it was pushing 8pm, and I had a long phone list in front of me. Before tonight I really had only watched the debates, read about the financial crisis in the NyTimes and WSJ, but I had a few minutes to read the blurbs on barackobama.com.

Here is what was given for the benefits of the Obama-Biden Healthcare plan:

Reduce Costs and Save a Typical American Family up to $2,500 as reforms phase in:

Lower drug costs by allowing the importation of safe medicines from other developed countries, increasing the use of generic drugs in public programs and taking on drug companies that block cheaper generic medicines from the market
Require hospitals to collect and report health care cost and quality data
Reduce the costs of catastrophic illnesses for employers and their employees.
Reform the insurance market to increase competition by taking on anticompetitive activity that drives up prices without improving quality of care.

After getting a few hangups, proud supporters and those who'd rather keep their position private, I called someone from Ohio who asked me to put Obama's healthcare plans in context. I mentioned that Obama was prepared to offer a $2,500 benefit to families. 'What are Palin and McCain are giving me?' I knew the answer, I had seen the debates, watched Colbert, Stewart and SNL. I spoke quickly 'Well, $5,000 but that benefit is taxed...' and by the time I had said that it was over. Before I could get any more out, the response was 'Well, then, I'm not interested.' What a perfectly fair comment coming from someone who just received an unsolicited call from a campaign volunteer at 8:16pm on a Sunday night!

I did think if I could put the healthcare issue in the correct context the person I called might have thought differently. But really, if you are already leaning McCain, there is no reason to think too hard, 5,000 > 2,500. Start photoshopping a Failwhale with Obama O's for me.

Here's a dreamscape of what the call felt like: I was carrying an original of one of those nice looking, red and blue painted Obama 'Hope' posters. I was carrying the poster in front of me down the street, and then because I didn't hold it at the right angle couldn't see where I was walking and bumped into a voter from Ohio whose hand poked a hole right through it.

I get the same feeling when I think about how the above picture, from Jef Aerosol (see arrow at photo's bottom left corner), the artist who sprays great, layered, B&W, photo-realistic art of 60's and 70's cultural figures, in public places all over the Upper West Side. The spraypaint used to be an homage to Woody Allen, but is now nearly ruined and more confusable with a violent album cover. The once subtle portrait now has a graffitti tag and Woody with half his ass eaten off and a lascerated head. On the surface Jef's art was just a public message, no different than fliers that say 'Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar'. One day you have art that represents the cultural history of the upper west side, then someone adds '9-11-01 :)' in magic marker to that and 15 other things all over the neighborhood. It's all vandalism, but now Jef's message will undoubtedly get lost in translation.

If there is art to Barack Obama's Healthcare plan it would require voters who've understood it to cultivate it, fill in the blanks, and make the arguments fit the community. I could have done that more artfully on the phone. But how should I have explained quickly that a $5,000 credit is not as good as a $2,500 savings? Explaining that the average healthcare plan costs anywhere from 8-14,000, and that McCain's 5,000 credit was insufficient would have been a good start.

The same problem exists for the Obama-Biden tax plan, McCain's plan says he's lowering taxes for everyone, which no one would think to argue with unless they had a good understanding (much better than mine) of how much money his budget requires, and what that budget leaves out. In this case work was done to visualize the treatment of each income bracket from each tax plan, and the traditional media with the help of some bloggers actually improved upon the candidates' explanations:

Freakonomics compares perceptually different graphs of the candidates' tax plans.

The Washington Post's graph helps people do the following: look at your own bracket and either sigh relief or shriek in freakonomic terror. The blogger tweaks, (graphs 2 and 3) actually enhance overall readability of the tax plans. If more analysis were done here, such as a chart that showed the full revenue of all the taxes collected by the government and how much more is gained from Obama's plan, then compared with both campaigns' plans for military spending, healthcare spending, education spending etc., maybe I would have had an easier time explaining my talking points.

But then again, I'm calling someone after dinner on Sunday, and I'm talking on a mobile phone to their mobile phone or landline. I'm not taking control of their TV with a mouse-pointer. Discussion with undecideds is always going to be difficult because of limited time, however it seems to not matter when we start the campaigning, there's never enough time.

The candidates have the technology but not the desire to support open discussion about how hard it is to get the word to the streets effectively. Their websites say so little, yet are seen by so many. That's not a good policy for teaching hopeful organizers, but it is a safe bet so that arguments are not turned against you. Much like how religious groups are organized, questioning the faith is not done in public. Bulletin boards or chat rooms on mccainspace.com or barackobama.com are used to post flickr and youtube, which are just snapshots, not interactive discussion tools. Elections.twitter.com site performs beautifully, but moves very fast, it's actually a re-skinned Summize.com that emphasizes election keywords, which is less geared for discussion than for recording and containing negative sentiment.

But maybe there should be somewhere that goes further toward incorporating all the relevant documentation for real discussion. Maybe offering better tools for understanding is just as good as campaigning for your side. A wiki that just informs for the sake of informing would go a long way toward articulating the best candidate's positions, and it would do a lot better than Hulu at organizing all the parodies we love to watch.

Lucius Fox Opts Out

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:40:00 +0000

I had to wait to post about the Dark Knight, when I learned that Morgan Freeman in real life had been in an accident. I hope he is doing better. Someone once (insert late night host here) worried that he might get confused hearing his own voice back when he prays. The only thing I do not worry about is his reputation, which even after Dave Chappelle made him out to be the root of all controversy in Real Deep Impact, it is clear that there is no way to tarnish the character of Morgan Freeman in our minds. He's the authority figure for anything related to virtue; the man's name is a relevant search result when paired with 'God Almighty', yet he's remembered for the humility of Hoke Colburn in Driving Miss Daisy and the 'guy who can get you things' in Shawshank Redemption. He was even an employee at the Electric Company, (with Peter Griffin) and is the voice over for the Visa commercials at the Olympics, and he's going to play Mandela soon. So now more than ever he is your conscience, and if he tells you something is wrong, it's wrong...

In the Dark Knight, Freeman plays Lucius Fox. Lucius, the gadgetman, was quite proud of himself for applying 3D sonar to an unreleased Nokia to outsmart Lau in his HK tower, but when Batman unveils his 'social networking' version of 3D Sonar later in the movie it's not Lucius Fox who's upset. To me I clearly hear Morgan Freeman shining through in his great disappointment in Batman for trespassing on the city of Chicago's civil liberties. Yes, Morgan Freeman was against using private location data, even to foil the Joker.

Would Morgan Freeman be just as miffed at the fact that most people on social networks default to giving away their private data? Would he just lose it if he walked into the offices of Facebook and Tapulous and found most social graphs to be quite revealing? Is there not something for which this aggregated data would be useful or artistic that would calm Lucius Fox from thinking that it's necessary to keep location data private? Or is this whole endeavor condemned to darkness? Should we be opt-ing out more?

I've been letting every application I have on my iPhone know my location. I know, I still don't have the GPS enabled iPhone 3g, so that's kind of cheating because the location I update is pretty much 'he's in NYC'. But just like with everything else interactive I'm letting my guard down in favor of improved services, just as Batman trades in his old, one-piece batsuit for Lucius Fox's new model with more flexible armor. Since there are now spaces, joints where he could get hit, Lucius warns Bruce Wayne that he's no longer impervious to bullets with the new suit on.

For matters of virtue, I have set my default to Mr. Gravitas, Morgan Freeman. However, I'm not ready to opt-out for new services. For now I'm going to offer up my location. I'm also not ready to opt-out of Google or Yahoo's targeted advertising. I want the new Batsuit. I wasn't afraid of gmail giving me relevance to my advertisements on the right side of the page, and actually, this whole 3D sonar thing to me is just the prep-work for how targeted outdoor advertising would work.

I'd see it working in the following way...your phone repeats everything around you back to a server and not only is location used, but the sights and sounds, local news and everything else could be in play. Wouldn't it be cool to see what kind of ads show up based on all the stuff people were saying around you at the Radiohead show on Liberty Island last Saturday? I mean everyone was singing along, and then there were little fights breaking out when random girls were fighting for position - wouldn't it be interesting if those keywords somehow generated the BeKanyeNow Absolute ad?

Maybe a human element could be introduced. The true targeted advertising warrior would be someone sitting in Lucius Fox's chair, who with a mastery of pop culture could program ads to be funny or ironic based on what's going on in front of you. Say you notice lots of people stopping and staring at the posters of Swing Vote, all over the Upper West Side, and it's not because we like it it's because we're clearly not getting the point of this movie. Like a performance artist you play with the keywords coming from all the phones to generate the right contextual tag line that understands that you are skeptical of Kevin Costner and that there's a movie about politics just because it's election season.

This dark knight / advertising warrior would have the power to rickroll entire cities or just connect with one person based on the data coming in from their phone and the advertising creative the dark knight was licensed to use. To me that would have Real Deep Impact - I'd actually love it. Most people revile at any advertising innovation as an invasion of something or other, but to me when you let innovation flourish life becomes one of Hitchcock's slices of cake. You wouldn't have to run this type of personalization all the time, just when there's lots of real traffic.

To me, this whole mobile phone plot twist was really just Batman's first social. He's never outsourced help like this that I can remember. The 3D Sonar is dismissed in the film, but it sure does make the phone seem powerful. In real life on the Nokia S60 platform you can make a room full of phones play music or play networked games as long as you have a maestro to orchestrate it. To all of this I can hear Christian Bale breathlessly shout 'But, does it have iTunes?'

FailWhale: My First Media Buy

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:33:00 +0000

So I'm at work, and have a meeting in 10 minutes. However, since @ev responded faster than I thought he might @ev's atsponse. I thought I'd write a quick post slightly longer than 140 characters to reply to a question that I'm guessing Twitter would like to ask right now: 'What are you doing?'

Well as simply as I can put it, this:

1) Upholding intellectual property for designers such as @yiyinglu, because the creatives in advertising and product development have relatively little power these days.

2) Saying thank you to all the people that keep twitter up, all the recent outages are just reminders to me of how much I use, rely and value twitter as a communications utility and for keeping tabs on more of the world more of the time. See my post FTW Twitter the first global presence

3) Making my first media buy...@ev has 14,412 followers, 20 t-shirts to outfit twitter cost $361.17 sponsored in part by the failwhale fanclub. That translates into the following in media buying terms: a $25.06 CPM, @yiyinglu will let me know how many shirts are sold = CPA, and maybe zazzle can help me find the CPC. Summize can then tell me the word of mouth effect which would be enormous, because there's already many people retweeting @ev here's the Summize feed for the keyword "FailWhale" http://summize.com/search?q=failwhale.

It would have sucked if @ev didn't tweet about it, so really it was more like buying a call, but that's moot. Thanks for making the experiment work @ev! This post basically kills any scientific value because I'm giving 'aided awareness' here...whatever...

One thing I'd love to know is - how many impressions were mobile?

Basically this all started when I made my own FailWhale t-shirt and got a huge reception from people at Internet Week in NYC during the first week of June.

(Sorry John Adams and Jeff Bezos, I had to do this before twitter got past the 2 pizza marker, but feel free to customize your own failwhale shirts :-) )

More here on the fanclub website that Sean O'Steen launched today http://failwhale.com/

@tlimongello

Shack-fu: the rev....renovation continues

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:35:00 +0000

So I realized my last post missed the biggest restaurant group in NYC, the Union Square Hospitality Group creators of my favorite burger joint in Madison Square Park Shake Shack!!
Shaq-fu is as good a reference as any to the uptown downtown food-fight that I've been chronicling, for no good reason, of late. What I like about the new shake shack is that it not only means that soon I will be both working and living a few blocks away from a shake shack (I need a good insurance policy), but the suspense... 'late 2008' means that I can live from now until then in an 80s montage. Let me explain:

Tom's Theory of Relatively Easy Renovation ca. 1980-1991:

"In the 1980s, all you had to do was paint an old residential or commercial space to change the course of events that shapes your life"

There is also Tom's corollary, evidenced in Breakin' 2 Electric Boogaloo:

"you can also dance outdoors, and thereby earn money to fund such a renovation, which guarantees that you will win in your upcoming life endeavor."

One stipulation, you cannot chart such succe$s unless you do it on posterboard with either a jagged upward sloping arrow or a magic marker made fundraising goal thermometer. You can however have an awesome soundtrack and have life move at an 80s pace during such montage.

Examples that I can remember of my theory bourne out in montages:
1) Revenge of the Nerds, renovating the LLL house to Bone Symphony's "Put one foot in front of the other"

2) Better off Dead fixing up a camaro to Howard Jones' "Like to get to know you well". Also has one of the other best pieces of wisdom the 80s had to offer from Charles DeMar "Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn."

3) Career Opportunities cleaning up Target ensures that jim will hook up with jennifer connelly

4) Dancing, painting and fundraising thermometers in Breakin' 2 Electric Boogaloo BTW Entertainment Weekly has a list of worst sequels, and they mention electric boogaloo in the article text, but EW dared not actually make that masterpiece one of the top 25 worst.

5) Secret of my Succe$s filmed at 101 park ave is basically a big montage with breaks for dialogue. Includes jagged posterboard growth charts, and I think instead of painting Michael J Fox changes clothes, dressing up and down to change his destiny.

Did I miss any?

So from my photo-heavy Columbus Shuffle post you can see that the painting, dancing and other renovation montage worthy actions are soon to be what's poppin' at the old jacques imo's location, and soon it will be a Shake Shack. And then, well the Upper West Side will be compleat.

Now I know what you're thinking...what about what I read in Gawker not 2 years ago about shake shack's sanitary conditions?

So, Shake Shack was once accused of stealing business strategy from the Muppets Take Manhattan when they hired rats to work in the kitchen. Big deal.

Maybe it was the muppets who started this whole painting for success craze anyway back in the muppet movie - download for free to your iPod or PSP my favorite track from the electric mayhem: Can you picture that?

Orion's Belt spotted on UpNext despite cloudy skies

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 03:50:00 +0000

Three New Restaurants on Columbus Ave in the 80s:

A few months ago I badgered my friends to accept my invites to UpNext, which is a 3D map of Manhattan that shows nearly every listing on the island from copy centers to senior citizen lounges in stuyvestant town. I saw there were upgrades to UpNext and realized I hadn't been back to UpNext.com in a while, but even after being obsessed with the grid for nearly 2 years from my perch on the UWS this is still the best orientation tool. Instead of using the limited view in Facebook I thought I'd go full screen, and though I usually use UpNext to figure out the labyrinth of downtown, tonight I saw the new stars shining brightly on the UpperWestSide.

What are the other two restaurants? In addition to Eighty One which I haven't yet been to, Pinch, which I knew was moving from Rose Hill where I work on Park Ave copied a mass market restaurant innovation that I happen to know quite well. In its new home Pinch has done for locally grown comfort food groups what Yum! Brands did for fast food groups: they combined its usual customized pizza barges with customized mac and cheese pots through a merger with the East Village's S'mac (same link as 3 lines up if you missed it) ....

This is a lot like those KFC/PizzaHut or TacoBell/LongJohn Silvers' albeit on an even smaller scale than B.R. Guest or Lettuce Entertain You . MicroFood mergers aren't necessary with the big players, with Yum! they even let you franchise with one click! I guess we need to use any sort of M&A model we can to rapidly move all downtown food industry brands to the Upper West Side. Don't be alarmed it's just part of the plan that I mentioned in an earlier post. But I know you're wondering, do we really need two pinkberries?

Orion's belt buckle is called Madeline Mae - Pan Asian & brunch. Haven't been there yet either.

The real winner here is UpNext. With millions of posts coming from the Grub Street Blog every second this nice visual display helped me catch the new UWS'izens much quicker and saved many searches and thus megabitings, which is a fine thing; seeing as last Tuesday was earth day and all.

FTW - twitter the first global presence

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:41:00 +0000

This is why I've become addicted, and this is why everyone who's been using has been clicking their heels and saying 'there's no place like home.'

Scobleizer @problogger knows how to TwitterBait me with an interesting video:

....(a little excerpt from the corporate blog) Does anyone know Twitter’s mobile web traffic based on their ~1MM users? Has anyone really commented about how this is the most global platform the web has ever seen? Even Facebook has to translate into each language to become relevant and Google has to strategize about how to win in China.

Twitter does not.

I wouldn’t have known since it’s been 5 years since I’ve been back to China but Paul Denlinger asked on Twitter if Twitter was the US’s QQ. [The background is Chinese startup Tencent developed QQ, which is like AIM and a Twitter-like mobile site TaoTao, which has Chinese carrier SMS support.] QQ has not made Chinese users ignore Twitter (at least not the ones I follow, they twitter all the time - see I can use qualitative data to prove my points too) - and why is that? It’s because once Twitter users anywhere figure out that they can twitter without text messaging there is an epiphany for each user as the text buzzing silences. We see Twitter as the asynchronous IM platform that only shows us what we choose to see from anywhere in the world at all times of day (sounds like the promise from web 1.0 doesn’t it?). The only difference between silicon valley and silicon alley is exactly 3 hours of twitter posts, china 12 hours (for half the year ).

If you carry your phone 18 hours a day that means that you have a much better shot at catching Robert Scoble’s updates about being on his startup tour in Israel this week on mobile. As I’m writing this I’ve just noticed that Kaiser Kuo is now following me. Kaiser blogs from Ogilvy in China, and if you follow him on Twitter (go ahead,) you might see some interesting stuff from him at 9pm as China wakes. If you get all of your information while at your desktop then you are missing out - you can catch updates as you wait for the bartender to pour your beer. I also can’t wait to see people from Cuba start twittering. I wouldn’t be able to deal with direct dialogue, but as Ian Schafer points out it’s the way to peek into our neighbor’s windows, because Twitter gets the rules of engagement just right.

I’m trying to stop looking at Twitter (sort of) but even on my way back from dinner the other night I found out that my favorite podcaster Cali Lewis of GeekBriefTV wanted help finding a location for a Thursday night meetup in NYC on the Upper West Side. I couldn’t resist by saying the Samsung Experience Center in Columbus Circle where mobile monday events are held would be the right place for all ages. A tip from Darren Rowse is that as long as you know how to write headlines and lead with questions instead of ‘here’s my newest blog post’ you can break news or ask for help all the time and allow people to let what is not valuable scroll by them.

See you at the Apple store Thursday at 6:00pm

@tlimongello

The Twilight Zone - Mobile Local Search

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 02:26:00 +0000

Imagine if you will... you get out of the Christopher Street stop on the 1 line with only a general idea of where you're going. You have the name of the bar/restaurant but it's a relatively new place and you don't remember the exact address. If you know the west village this is an area, which lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of man's knowledge.

What I was trying to do was find BarBlanc - which like most restaurants is much better at making drinks and brie cheese fingerling potato puree than websites. After speaking at Search Engine Strategies on Monday, I was thinking a lot about mobile search, so naturally when I realized I was lost I quickly struck the pose of the benighted mobile searcher - head down on the street corner tapping away while listening to music. I knew my sister was not around to call and ask and I personally hate calling 411 when on a street corner - not until Audeo links to a listings database and I can wear a white apple necktie that intercepts nerve impulses meaning to be sent down the arcuate fasciculus to have keywords appear in a page or an voice search system will I like that search experience (BTW, wikipedia makes for great neuro-quackery). Much simpler, 411 is only as good as the listing system, and new restaurants are abominable about having their info on anything but uncrawled flash websites that their cousins built for them.

So I typed in BarBlanc and Bar Blanc into Google Maps, then Timeout then I browsed Outalot then I went back to Google Mobile to search. Nothing.
Did you mean, some other crap that's obviously not what you wanted?

I started sweating, and the angled west village streets were coming in on me, starting to bow and bend like I had wall-eye, the disease popularized by hotshots in 1991. Just before the carnival music started playing in my head I remembered that there is another service out there that puts people on the job - ChaCha.

When Kevin Mazzatta from the search panel at SES last Monday outlined his service for 'search + brainpower' I immediately dissed (not out loud, audeo could have helped here). While still sitting on the panel I texted in using the free trial - 'when is this panel going to end at SES NYC?' and I got back 'SES runs from March 17 thru 20th, 2008' then Kevin almost as if he was watching my little texting conceit said that people start using ChaCha in what he called the 'cool phase' where they ask silly questions to make themselves feel cool and to show their friends while checking out the service, but then move towards regular usage and then become addicts. I felt like I had been rickrolled on mobile, a low-def but still humiliating experience.

On Thursday I asked 'Where is barblanc in NYC west village?' and I got back:

Now how awesome is that? My first genuinely spirited ChaCha...and it took about 40 seconds for me to get a response.

To be fair ChaCha required more of me typing than it would on google, and google is taking a look at reducing currently required typing, Google is testing out LCB. Mobile sites for listings often chart browsing paths to reduce the type load with links and drop-downs, but google is giving this method an acronym, which is nice, I like.

What was most valuable to me about using ChaCha was that I stopped sweating. I put out a request and got an answer back. I didn't just put out a request and get crap back because I was somehow asking the wrong way. Thinking of what ChaCha means, I'm curious to see if the discussion of refining of results is more like a dance with each ChaCha than search with engines.

Actually, what was great about using this service was not that it was any easier than regular search. Of course Voice entry or GPS input could have been more technically elegant, however for now it just leads to a multimedia duckroll (I only learned what this was in relation to rickrolling 15 mins ago - thanks dave).

ChaCha gets that you cannot automate a service until you know how to communicate with your customers. You can't bank on serving someone standing near Bank street in 35 degree weather if you are running one simple algorithm to process all requests. ReadWriteWeb says that ChaCha is running a massive artificial intelligence effort to improve results the more people use it, so why not broaden the capabilities of search by starting with the least scalable method - asking people what they want and tracking the human requests and human powered results? Can this have a cool phase? Maybe if you think of them like the Talking Heads....We're tappin' phonelines...you know that that ain't allowed...

Maybe Rod Serling inspired the over-sized talking head suits back in 1983...irregarhdliss mobile search to me is still Life During Wartime .

Last.FM, ball-pits and scrobbling I can believe in.

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:55:00 +0000

I should have taken my own photo, since I was sitting closer to Last.FM at the Glasshouse event Thursday, Feb 28th on 75 Murray street in Tribeca.

Instead I had to steal this one from from a flickr stream. A clearer shot would have shown the nice guys from Last.FM looked more like coldplay or radiohead than media-tech entrepreneurs, some may say they looked like nihilists from the Big Lebowski (that's a little harsh though).

I already had a last.fm account, but I became interested in firing it up again when I got home. I learned that Last.FM are going to use their scrobbling technology for local music collections soon, which means that you can track the songs you've played in systems like iTunes and access the 'global scrobbling database' outside of Last.FM as RJ explained to me after the talk. Last.FM said they were completely open to letting people move their social graph for music, which they create through scrobbling on Last.FM anywhere they want...basically scrobbling means letting Last.FM count the number of times they've played each track. This gives Last.FM a ginormous statistical database to do what Pandora, Finetune and others have tried to do in the field of collaborative filtering - which is to better recommend music to people such that it becomes effortless.

More important and immediate though, I learned that they, like xkcd have done something groundbreaking in terms of 2.0 office silliness, more worthy and symbolic of a 'bubble' than the foosball tables of web 1.0. They have in their office an adult sized ball pit, like the ones made famous by Seasame place back in the 80s. Felix Miller, in a rare digression from explaining the value of Last.fm as a business model described the Last.FM ball pit as an adult-sized one, that was so deep 'kids would get lost in der, yah'. As you can see from the photo, RJ who is probably 6'2", is in such danger.

I actually had a serious question for Felix, RJ and Martin that I asked once they opened up the mic for Q&A - since you guys are part of CBS, and now that CBS is supporting a free WiFi spot in NYC (it would have been better for Last.FM to have that spot in Central Park, but midtown is at least a start) do you have plans for developing special iPhone or other wifi device capabilities, and will CBS and Last.FM start marketing events with scrobblers in mind?

Their response was collective, frustrated and honest: Felix said the iPhone is just like a walkman that takes away the need to have a rucksack full of tapes on your back, Martin said that the carriers are just not letting people do what they want to with music and RJ said, you know if you use your phone in the UK to stream a song you are paying for data per kilobyte so it doesn't work. However, they said, there are a lot of phones already capable of scrobbling. They left the discussion there and encouraged imagination.

Last.FM may have been talking about support on Nokia phones as well as what I've found on Last.FM, an iPhone user group that shared the link to a pre-SDK Last.FM iPhone application for mobile scrobblers.

Since the SDK for the iPhone is probably going to happen in 1.1.5, before the summer (1.1.4 was released this week) I think that we might see more marketers using the free WiFi in midtown to their advantage...or at least they should. Currently what we see are SMS and IVR calls to action. In fact last week's Columbus Shuffle had a few of these that I didn't highlight because I ran out of time to post them. Here's what a company called situation marketing did to promote one of the many broadway show outdoor campaigns it manages, Passing Strange:

If you look at the bottom there is a call to action - text STEW to 42903 to hear songs from the upcoming Passing Strange. Situation marketing then sends you a phone number to call (to access the IVR system) which lets you browse through clips of songs in the show. I think that Last.FM can do the same sorts of promotions and send an SMS with a link to a mobile site so people on WiFi can discover new songs by any artist and share them with friends, like how the Zune promised last year people would start to do through infrared or bluetooth (does anyone do this?). CBS can use Last.FM not just for music discovery but offer event promotions, especially because they can based on the SMS delivery target to events in your area.

Can't wait for summer!!!

---

Looks like Last.FM is already working on the outdoor strategy, anyone going to SXSW? Let me know how the Band Aid promotion goes!

Columbus Shuffle

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:24:00 +0000

The snow is all but melted and today's sunshine and 40 degree weather was enough for me to show off what I'm calling the Columbus Shuffle, as there are lots of vacant restaurants and new additions to Columbus ave in the West 70's.

You can imagine the Columbus Shuffle as a storefront dance that borrows the tune from the Rolling Stones' Harlem Shuffle. Dovetail has gotten lots of great reviews (hopefully the last few discovering the uncovered Lindsay Lohan won't bring the nymag site down again), and the cupcake icon Magnolia Bakery is churning.

But there have been heavy asian casualties, hastening an end to their dominance of columbus ave with the demise of Hunan Park and the exhile from main street of Penang. Finally, in what may bring true closure to hurricane Katrina, Jacques Imo's rounds out the restaurant out-ings.

What will replace all these in their places is not yet certain, but it won't be a bouloud, that already happened in the West 60s.

The big question on all of our minds here on the UWS though is how long will we have to deal with Crocs. If they are staying for branding martyrdom or because they calculated that there were enough strollers to warrant planting roots on the UWS for the next crocs crop, I say at least make the place fun, and more of an emporium for sillyness. Offer a small bar for rice pudding by co-branding with Rice to Riches, then there will really be no frivolity that downtown can say we don't have up here on the Upper West Side

(they really do set the bar for 360 degree, multi-platform frivolity at rice-to-riches, see if you can sit through their whole flash intro)

Oh and the best part of pre-Oscars Sunday was the return of the Randolph and Mortimer tribute stand between 76th and 77th in the Columbus flea market.

Thou Shalt Not Vote

noreply@blogger.com (Tom, UWS, New York, NY) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Thou Shalt Not Vote, without full information...Thou shalt think for youselves...but you can use some help getting yourself to the polls.

I'm protesting by not voting in the NY primary. You know why? Well, as I updated in my facebook status, I'm a dumbass, for thinking that I could wait until I got to work and then vote down here in Flatiron (or Rose Hill if you prefer) rather than up on the Upper West Side. What could have saved me is the reason I'm not voting.

I got a voicemail from Chris Rock at 8:40 pm last night "whether you vote in every election or you've never voted before this Tuesday vote for Barack Obama" because he was inspired. I was inspired too, I saw Chris Rock in person at the Apollo, Barack said he was the funniest person in comedy, which is true because Dave Chappelle took his hat out of the ring.

So here's my reason for protest (which is completely unfair) Barack, is you went 90% of the way to being the tech president but that voicemail could have been even better. It could have linked me here actually no, it should have linked directly to a quick and easy Polling Locator website here... because I turned in early last night and didn't have a chance to check my laptop before I left in morning (ok I don't check my laptop in the morning unless all cell towers have stopped working). Barack and Co in Chicago - you didn't even have to build a mobile site to do this Mobile.USA.gov did it for you already all you had to do was link to them!!! I talked about this on MLK day when I spoke at Mobile Monday in Philadelphia, if the US government that runs its elections completely on paper can figure out a mobile site, media brands have no excuse. I even have pictures of me saying it (just one photo of me in a RockYou slideshow) for proof!

Right, so what's the real story? Ok, so I'm a dumbass, I forgot about the wisdom of the chads, I thought if 8 years pass that if I wanted to vote from work I can rather than be forced to vote in my district.

But, I think I was put off guard a bit because I remember hillary trying to stop big caucases in casinos in Nevada which I thought was somehow extended to primaries in states that aren't running caucuses as well. oh well. I could find the voting booth, but it was the wrong one and wasn't able to get back uptown in time for the 9pm close due to priors....my bad. Had I only known where to go this morning, I might have planned a little better. Maybe lazy voters like me shouldn't have a say in our electoral system? Or should busy people be rewarded for working hard and not having time enough to plan well ahead for voting?

BTW, I like that Flatiron is courting the Chinese and Korean votes (I understand Korean vote because of the proximity to K-town) not really sure on the Chinese. I'm not complaining, it's actually the first time I've seen the word Tou Piao (to vote) in Chinese printed in simplified characters.

I've never had someone comment to my blog, but if someone doesn't do so now I think that Feedreaders killed the Blogging star or I'm incapable of pissing people off! ;-)

Ok gotta go, Stephen Colbert just facebooked me a tune-in reminder about Super Tuesday

Inspiration for my title?
Nothing really, I just wanted an excuse to post this link to dan le sac vs. scroobius pip's infectious anti-everything groove with lyrics that won't leave my head such as "Thou Shalt Not judge a book by its cover, Thou Shalt Not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover....Thou Shalt Think for yourselves...."