Aug. 10, 2009
I’m all about telecommuting. Please stop printing stuff out for me, I have no fax.
Posted by matt in Your Business Universe, Your Delivery | 1 Comment
Mar. 24, 2009
CanvasWork makes parking meter bags, canvas bags for municipal, agricultural and industrial applications. He’s started blogging about his company and experience running a company with national clientelle in small town Minnesota. He’s off to a good start, I look forward to reading more in the future.
Posted by matt in Uncategorized, Your Business Universe, Your Delivery | No Comments
Feb. 9, 2009
After many conversations with wonderful educators dedicated to digital learning I think I stumbled on a missing piece of the pie. Since an amazing amount of content is being created and re-created for digital learning I thought it might be appropriate to facilitate a free exchange of Moodle courses to foster greater communication and sharing in the digital world.
I’ve started MoodleShare just for this purpose. It is currently in beta but open to anyone who would like to help contribute to this project. Register now at http://www.moodleshare.com/.
Posted by matt in Power of Ten, Your Delivery, Your Strategies, Your Tactics, Your Vision | No Comments
Jan. 14, 2009
If you’ve ever wondered what is going on with the dreck that ends up on your site in comment fields, forums and other interactions here is the answer from Google:
Posted by matt in Uncategorized, Your Delivery, Your Tactics | No Comments
Dec. 26, 2008
Is there a fundamental shift going on? The information age may finally be showing its true power. It allows place shifting, time shifting, and instantaneous communications, alerts, and data, that are having powerful effects on our traditional economic forces that we have only begun to understand. I found the following quote tremendously frightening and exciting at the same time.
Bits Of Destruction
This downturn will be marked in history as the time where many of the business models built in the industrial era finally collapsed as a result of being undermined by the information age. Its creative destruction at work. It’s painful and many jobs will be lost permanently. But let’s also remember that its inevitable and we can’t fight it. Technology and information forces are unstoppable and they will reshape the world as we know it regardless of whether or not we want them to.
Posted by matt in Power of Ten, Your Business Universe, Your Clients, Your Delivery, Your Strategies | 1 Comment
Dec. 3, 2008
http://www.adaptiveavenue.com/
Banner ads are finally growing up. With the web becoming more semantic and service oriented its now possible to put the Sistine Chapel on the head of a pin, and dynamically serve up just about anything in your banner ads, quantitative testing, qualitative testing, ecommerce and database driven content and more. At Target we called this the super widget and it took five years from idea to implimentation, now it is becoming common place.
I see getting the creatives on board will be the biggest challenge, they hate designing or writing to templates, but the future isn’t going to wait for them.
“Bant Breen, the president of worldwide digital communications at Initiative, the Interpublic Group media buying and planning firm, had a similar view. “The traditional creative process right now is not structured to essentially deliver hundreds of permutations, or hundreds of ideas for messaging,” said Mr. Breen, whose firm is using Tumri to determine which ads are working.
“There’s no doubt that there will be a lot of data that can be collected that could be applied to the creative process.”
But, he said, “that’s not necessarily an easy discussion to have with great art directors.””
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/business/media/03adco.html?_r=1&ref=media
Since we are doing this on the net now, can we get the web to print version working as well? This will be fun!
Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Tactics | 2 Comments
Dec. 3, 2008
Date: Friday December 5, 2008
Time: 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Location: B-26 Walter Library on the Minneapolis campus
http://dmc.umn.edu/usability/directions.shtml :: for lab location and directions
Event: Opportunity for faculty, staff, students, and the general public to tour the Usability Services Lab at the University of Minnesota. My team will be happy to show you the lab and discuss our services. Our usability consultants will be doing demonstrations of sample usability evaluation tasks, using our eye-tracking equipment.
Objective of the lab: We help project teams and researchers obtain the user perspective on the way that information is presented on a computer screen. The usability lab provides an environment in which teams are able to observe users trying out a Web site or other design. We offer usability testing and other services, utilizing screen capture, video, audio, and eye-tracking tools and equipment in the lab. We provide services both to web design teams and to academic researchers.
No sign-up is necessary. Visitors may stop by anytime during the Open House hours.
Contact Info:
Alice de la Cova
Usability Services Manager
Office of Information Technology’s Digital Media Center
University of Minnesota
(612) 624-9365
a-dela@umn.edu
Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Tactics | No Comments
Nov. 5, 2008
I’ve had this notion for a while, I don’t know if anyone has perfected it yet, some companies have gotten close. I want to be able to create an Indesign template, upload it into a web based system that will allow me to edit predefined areas through a web browser, put it into an approval queue, once it is approve it automatically resizes itself a bit into one of 14 predefined sizes and then is transferred automagically to the publications as defined in the media buying system.
This should be done already. Websites have been doing it for years in the form of database driven websites. Now that the Indesign file format is basically just XML it really isn’t a very large leap to do a few integrations between exisitng technologies and have a whole new product that any company that does regional or nation newspaper advertising, or magazine advertising would love to utilize.
Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Projects, Your Tactics | No Comments
Oct. 31, 2008
Just had the most fantastic lunch with a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in years. Inspiration comes in many forms in our lives, reading, viewing, books, friendly conversation. Nothing beats a great lunch to spur the old green pea and get some juices flowing.
We touched on social networking for non-profits, immersive environments, post implementation adoption, moo.com, and network attached storage. Remarkable!
If anyone out there is good at grant writing, I’ve got an amazing idea we’d like to work with you on!
Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Partners, Your Projects, Your Vision | No Comments
Oct. 28, 2008
The Print Production Club of the Twin Cities met tonight at Bolger. After some great wine and food we were treated to Dick Bolger talking about green initiatives in the printing community, a fantastic and honest presentation that I enjoyed immensely. Even though the Marketing and Advertising industry consumes a great deal of natural resources, there are ways for us all to be mindful of how much we are consuming, the impacts of that consumption, the upstream effects, and downstream effects. The choices we make in purchasing and producing materials to sell, should have as light of a touch as possible on our mother earth, to make sure our sons and daughters have a world that supports them as it has supported us, and is enjoyable to live in.
Posted by matt in Your Delivery, Your Partners, Your Tactics | No Comments
Oct. 27, 2008
The advertising challenge of today is how does a marketer cut through all of the media clutter and noise to get to your targeted demo, where are they? They could be hanging out with Oprah at oprah.com, watching and uploading videos at Youtube, shooting net friends in an online game, or they could be living, breathing, collaborating, creating the next generation of media through mash-ups and remixing, or creating and categorizing their own content by blogging and tagging.
Its interesting now that the promises made in the 90’s are finally coming to pass. With service based architectures the dream of publishing once, view anywhere, is quickly coming to fruition. As the new standards shake out you have to be there, on the forefront, innovating. It is time for you to learn about the power of the semantic web and its impact on media type specific content creation and delivery.
How will marketers and advertisers get close to a clients customers? By living with them online, getting close to them, offer them ways to alter content, ways to interact with the messaging, create their own messaging, be the brand champions to influence others. This was the promise we were dreaming about in the 90s. It is here.
Look for posts coming up soon on:
- Communities and the social web.
- Folksonomies and tagging.
- The democratization of news.
- Remixing and mash-ups
- The digitization of everything.
