Technology

find products for your customers

Advertising, Marketing, Technology 0 Comment

I remember this story from last year about the kid who invented a doorbell which calls the householder’s mobile phone if nobody answers the door.

Laurence Rook, the 13 year old boy from Croydon in South London, said he got the idea after noticing his mother had missed several deliveries by not being in the house.

Laurence licensed his invention off to the tune of circa 250k.

At the time it struck me that the combined innovation departments of BT, Orange, T-mobile, Vodafone and goodness knows who else from the telco sector had failed to notice this simple customer insight/problem, yet a 13 year-old kid, paying attention, had come up with fantastic piece of utility using a sim card and some bits and pieces lying about the house.

Another one that the telco’s have missed cropped up on FIR: the Hobson and Holtz Report podcast that I listened to this morning in the car.

This was the first time I’d heard of Connectify, a software based router for Windows computer that shares wi-fi connections your other devices.

One of the principal benefits for the business, or otherwise, traveller being that in many hotels the wi-fi access is limited to one device at a time – Connectify solves that conundrum.

Again, one has to wonder why this had to be invented by a small start-up (the software’s development was funded via crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, by the way)
when there was a simple customer insight to be leveraged and yet none of the telco’s saw the opportunity.

I’m reminded of this simple maxim that Seth Godin is often quoted on, in regard to where businesses should look for innovation opportunities and to temper the impulses that lead them to be hellbent on acquisition of new customers.

‘Don’t just look to finding customers for your products, find products for your customers.’

Do not track

Advertising, Marketing, Technology 0 Comment

Certain unscrupulous corners of the advertising world, those on the dark side of the (other) digital divide, are not best pleased.

It appears that Microsoft are sticking to Plan A and shipping ‘Do-Not-Track’ as the default option in Internet Explorer 10.

Do Not Track is a web privacy scheme that tells online advertisers to NOT collect or use data specific to a user’s web activity.

Advertisers can still show ads, obviously, but they would not be allowed to record that a user browsed certain car websites, for example, and then proceed show car ads where ever they go.

While these advertisers were reported to be willing to put up with ‘Do-Not-Track’, they were only accepting the basis that it was certain to be something that users had to actually enable and activate for themselves. Read More

Why your website is like great hair

Design, Technology, UX 2 Comments

Let me tell you a story about my hair.

Now before you roll your eyes and move on, bear with me for a few paragraphs.

Currently, my hair reaches past my shoulder blades. You’d think this means getting up extra early in the morning to tend to it before work.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

On the days where ‘styling’ is required, I need only minimal effort — I wash, I comb, I dry (some parts),, and off I go on my merry way.

So what does all this waffle have to do with websites, and why is it important to you? The answer is in two parts… Read More

Curiosity

Creative, Inspiration, Strategy, Technology 0 Comment

One of the many things we owe to the enquiring and brilliant mind of Sir Isaac Newton is our modern understanding of light and colour. Up until the late 1600s, white light was widely considered to be a pure and irreducible subtance. The notion that it constituted in some hidden way all the colours of the rainbow was not merely fanciful but arguably heretical.

And then one day Newton jammed a needle into his eye socket… Read More

Introducing the 8th of the mass media. Augmented Reality comes of age.

Design, Social media, Technology 0 Comment

Presumably everyone noticed Google announcing it’s initial experiments with augmented reality glasses under the codename ‘Project Glass’.

I’ve included below the video that demonstrates the anticipated capability of the ‘device’ that shows voice commands being used to send messages, take photos, share to G+, see the locations of friends, view maps, get product information and so on and so forth.

It’s been accepted for some cosiderable time now that the next evolution of computing is likely to be ‘wearable’. We’ve all seen the speculation and prototypes around wristband iphones, bendy tablets and all the rest. Read More

We’re hiring: UX Architect [Sputnik Agency: Sydney]

Careers, Design, Strategy, Technology 0 Comment

Working closely with all areas of the agency, clients and technology partners, the User Experience Architect is responsible for owning the definition, UX design, delivery and support of customer experience solutions within any campaign or project.

The primary purpose of the UserExperience Architect at Sputnik Agency is to ensure that as a business, thesolutions we deliver to our clients are the ideal marriage of creative innovation, best practice user experience and online business strategy for the client and their customer. Read More

Programming. Probably more fun than you think.

Creative, Inspiration, Technology 1 Comment

I used to be a programmer.

Wait, come back. I’ll try to make this interesting.

Over the past decade I’ve coded websites to sell things both useless and useful. To matchmake lonely hearted singles, educate university students and deliver workplace training. I’ve coded spy games for children, sprawling eLearning systems, dinky little novelty sites. And (sorry) countless advertising emails.

These days I’m more of what you might call a dabbler but I still like to dive in and write some code when opportunity arises. Whenever I do, I’m reminded of just how wonderful it is to be immersed within the buzzing, humming universe of an evolving computer program. People who don’t code rarely expect this but for all of its technical rules and structural discipline, programming at its heart is a richly creative activity. Read More

The myth of the ‘influencers’

Social influence, Strategy, Technology 0 Comment

Here’s the thing.

This keeps coming up, so just to be clear on what is and isn’t correct it’s worth considering this.

There’s a lot of false assumption and BS that tends to fly about ‘seeding’ and ‘bloggers’ and ‘online pr’ etc with regards to the relative ‘influence’ that certain individuals supposedly have on the behaviour of the rest of us.

And this:

The alleged ‘influencers’, or ‘the few’ if you remember The Tipping Point are documented as consisting of, at most, 10-15% of any given population.
These ‘influencers’ are the so-called opinion-leaders in any given category or sphere.

These ‘influencers’ are thought to initiate up to, and at most, 25-30% of the conversations about brands in any category or sphere.

While these people do have some influence, granted, it’s a danger to overestimate that influence. Read More