Brilliant.

|

Nice TV ad for Evian's Live Young Campaign, directed by Michael Gracey and created by agency Euro RSCG. Music is "Rapper's Delight" by Dan the Automator.

Check out the Live Young website at http://evianliveyoung.com/

(Hey you people at Euro RSCG, let me know more often when you have good stuff like that! Write at latenightdave@hotmail.com).

|

Folks, this is the kind of product that truly will propel you into...TEH FUTURE *insert echo here*

(and yes, I always say it this way. It provides somewhat of a dramatic yet slightly ironic tone to my tech news).

Discover the Vuzix iWear AV230 XL+, a lightweight pair of stereoscopic glasses which provide the same experience as watching a 44-inch screen viewed from 9 feet.

Short of getting yourself a $3000 flatscreen complete with THX sound or a $50,000 full-on VR headset with touch feedback, these glasses might provide a pretty awesome gaming or movie-watching experience. As mentioned on the site, the dual displays provide "crisp images and vivid colors through optics aligned to military specifications", and the glasses feature removable high-quality stereo headphones (altough when a product description features the words "removable" and "high-quality" in the same sentence, I always tend to read "removable quality". But that's just me. I like alphanumeric naming. Feed me XTX-2000 bran and nut flakes anytime, I'll feel like a superhero.)

I haven't had the chance to actually review these goggles yet, but I like the premice this new model offers, just from description. Just so you know, past reviews about these type of glasses featured rants about "annoying scan lines" affecting picture quality, average sound and tired eyes -- all for a steep price. But it seems the good folks at Vuzix heard the cries of our people, and came up with this product retailing for less than $200 bucks while providing a kickass-end experience.

If you own a pair and would like to give me your impressions, go ahead and let the readers know!

|

I've introduced the incredible work of CG company Image Metrics in a past blog post. But I've recently stumbled across this incredible CG feat on the web: meet Emily: The Tech Demo. She's entirely 3D. Threeeeee-D, friends.

Watch and be amazed.

|

Author and "personal brand" evangelist Dan Schawbel wrote a thoughtful piece about "Why you shouldn't brand yourself as a "Social Media Expert" on his blog, a mandatory read for anyone trying to figure out social media and giving themselves the title "expert" as they do it.

Read it here.

|

Yeah I know, it's usually "Inspiration Tuesdays", but this was so good I couldn't wait 'til next week to share.

Introducing Nick Bertke, some guy I discovered off YouTube. It appears our friend Nick is a natural talent at producing genius music and films, and if he keeps going at it, might make a decent living being a superstar. Scrounging inside some old Walt Disney animations, Nick came up with delicately crafted, otherworldy mellow tunes. Something Björk-like, with a hint of sweetened Chemical Brothers but with its own smooth flavour. Being a musician myself, I'm no music critic but I know talent when I hear it.

I first got blasted off by this page I stumbled upon, moving on to YouTube where I discovered his other productions. Homemade sights and sounds copyright Nick Bertke. Here are some of my favorites (keep reading after the break):





Nick also has excellent flair for storytelling and film photography. Take your eyes on a ride with Out With It (see at end of post), a short movie about a guy, a girl, and something real bad happening. M. Night Shyamalan could be red with envy on this one, if it was only pursued into a 2-hour flick. I know I was sucked into it instantly.

I don't know of Nick's other talents, but I truly hope he gets discovered by big cheeses - something great might happen. Check out Nick's work on YouTube: search for Fagottron (interesting choice of nickname), and look him up on Last.Fm as well. Google him, for all it's worth, things are getting interesting for our friend. I do expect this guy to get his 15 minutes of fame sometime soon.

Good luck with that, amigo.

|

I just discovered Go2web20.net, a great place to discover some truly cool web 2.0 applications that'll change the way you use the web. Happy browsing!

|

Being creative is about generating new opportunities for yourself, and for others.

Every day should be a new, empty slate allowing you to make use of your own creativity: Whether it is as about finding a new or better way to do your work, daring to go someplace you never would have in other times, inventing something you think could generally change your status quo.

It can be big, it can be small, but you never know how far an idea could go in creating some "new" in your life, generating new goals for yourself, and making you feel in charge.

Creation is change. And in the words of Winston Churchill: "Change is the essence of life. Be ready to surrender what you are, for what you could become."

|

...and a ton of other BRILLIANT ideas you wish you had, available at http://www.inewidea.com/

|

"Measure your impact and success in Social Media".

In other terms, a fantastic tool for discovering if you're an influent twit, or not.

http://www.twitalyzer.com

|

The simple vanilla facts. A repost from an earlier blog post that disappeared (?), back by popular demand.

|

Tolkien fans, you will go crazy on this one. The Hunt For Gollum is an entirely independent movie created by (very technically adept) fans and directed by writer-director Chris Bouchard. And this one will keep your stomachs full until (unafilliated) Peter Jackson goes crimson with envy and creates three more.

Production began in early 2007 when Chris started adapting the script from the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, and was released on May 3rd for public viewing *entirely free* (most probably with the hope that some huge distributor will notice and buy the distribution rights).

I've watched it. It's surprisingly well done. All along you wonder, for every element that comes on scene, "will they get it right?". Well for an indepedent short that, as for every indepedent short, usually deals with limited budget and rests on the talent and passion of its makers, trust me, "they get it right". It hits the spot much more that anything George Lucas recently made, if I have to make the sorry comparison.

You be the judge. Click here to watch the movie for free.

|

An open letter to my Social Media Marketing group on the LinkedIn network, from group moderator Michael Crosson (a typical user, not a LinkedIn employee). If you're on LinkedIn and are using groups, this concernts YOU. You be the judge.

"Hello, everyone - I am using a new feature on LinkedIn to contact you about something very important to all of us - social networking. I'm sure you joined in order to find information and resources, get feedback and network with other people interested in Social Media Marketing.

But LinkedIn has just made some policy changes that have severely restricted what group managers can do and makes the functionality of this group much more limited.

What they have done:

1. Taken away my ability to send you the monthly email newsletter that I have produced in the past. I can no longer access the group's email list.

2. Taken away my ability to send you individual welcome letters or direct correspondence. I can't even view who is a member of this group, it is limited to seeing only 500, not the entire 15,000+.

3. Forced advertising onto profile and other pages - but the group managers do not profit. There is no revenue share. I don't make a dime from any of the work I put into LinkedIn. [Note from Ed: This is just like you creating a web page, and some company putting web banners on your page without you getting any money from the advertising. Cheap.]

4. By disabling the email list download, I now have ZERO visibility into group performance reports that I used to have through my email management system. I can't tell how many people are unsubscribing, how many undeliverable emails there are, etc. etc. LinkedIn has NO reporting capabilities whatsoever.

They claim they had to do this because some unscrupulous managers were building lists for spam. Their response is penalize all the legitimate group managers for the actions of a few bad apples. There are far better ways to deal with this issue.

I pride myself in moderating and managing this group to the best of my ability. For almost a year, we have grown at 25% a month. LinkedIn overall has grown almost at much. The fact is, it is groups like ours that makes LinkedIn successful. But now they are biting the hand that feeds them. My ability to interact and network with you as individual members has been completely hamstrung. This is the only way to reach you individually.

I URGE YOU TO TAKE ACTION AND VOICE YOUR OPINION. Ask them to rescind this heavy-handed and totally unnecessary tactic. Send an email directly to the Founder, Chairman and CEO of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, directly on his LinkedIn page: http://snipr.com/eke5g

Thanks for taking the time and for participating in Social Media Marketing. Let's keep growing and improving it, and that means growing and improving LinkedIn, too."

Comment away.

|

Powerful video about change, created by a Chicago student for the American Association of Retired Persons's U@50 challenge (it placed 2nd! I'd like to see what came first...). It was based on "Recrear", a message created by agency Savaglio\TBWA that won a silver lion in 2006.

But that's besides the point: the adaptation is simply outstanding. Well chosen, and well done my Windy City friend -- you chose the right vehicle to get a powerful message across.

Enjoy. (Thanks, Virginie!)

|

Delicious homemade promo by motion graphics and 3D mighty house Buzz Image, here in Montreal. Enjoy!

Way too sexy... lipdub from Buzz Image on Vimeo.

|

Inspiration Tuesdays are back! To start off easy, I want you to see these guys: 512k.net

I'm not sure what they do exactly, because my Japanese skills can be summed up in my ability to politely request an adequate lunch at the nearest sushi bar. My guess is they are a regroupment of flash motion graphics experts, able to create eye-catching presentations in a 512k file. Or maybe a public challenge, requiring flash artists and normal people to shell out their best flash animations in a 512k max file.

At any rate, they held my full attention for the complete showing of this:

http://512kb.net/flash5.htm

Enjoy.

|

Scouring the web these days you can find a plethora of blogs, tweets and web sites on which marketing consultants tell you how to "optimize your campaign using social media", or how "Twitter can be a great complement to your integrated advertising campaign". And AdKrispies is no exception. The search for the next great way to market to consumers has spilled much digital ink.

But while this is great from a theoretical point of view, I still fail to see concrete applications of social media inside actual campaigns. Companies are still tip-toeing in social media and emergent communication, and on rare instances will you actually see an actual campaign that's entirely wrapped around social media.

I'm not saying I find this disappointing, but I'm honestly getting a bit fed off with the fact that the hunt for social media information seems to be more important than its actual application. People seem to be on a Twitter craze, posting and reposting everything they find on the matter.
As I mentioned before, blogs are eloquent on the matter. There are five to ten 2.0 social media startups sprouting everyday on the web, "helping me better connect to people and places".

Well, it seems the more I spend time getting connected to people, things and places these days, the less I actually see them. My time hunting for social media is taking too much time, and not generating enough money. If social media is going to be an important part of the communications business, well it should start acting as such.

Monetize, don't just theorize.

Edit: I personally congratulate the people at Skittles for coming up with their new website and its brilliant use of social media. Bold move, yet full of win.

|

"What is the value of my service? How much should I charge? Can I charge (without feeling guilty or being scolded by my userbase)? Will users be willing to pay for it? Or will they think it's not worth the value or worse, the effort? A lot of these questions are racing around inside many an online entrepreneur's mind.

Chris Anderson, in a recent article on the realities of the online economy (read "The Economics of Giving It Away") summed up the problem into one sentence: "For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.".

How very true. You can't count all the major services, widgets and apps that are emerging online, that struggle at finding a way to monetize themselves, yet offer brilliant, well-planned and worthy products that are used by millions. Major names among these include Meebo, Twitter, Facebook, Friendster, Joost -- all of them, barenaked free.

Of course you can't complain about this openly without being touted as a capitalist pig. Because the web was built as a place for freedom and democracy in the sharing of information. Or was it?

Well, that's the whole question. It seems the basic rules of "offline" commerce, when applied to "online" businesses, become obscured by the powerful influence of installed web culture, a phenomenon which I call the User Prerogative Factor (UPF). I believe this factor to be an unavoidable presence to consider when building or improving (read 'trying to monetize') an online business.

Basically, the UPF could be given the following definition: "Web usage habits always override the value of a website's contents". Which is to say that, to a generic user, your website's product or service offer is always worth less than how the web is being used at the moment. Not following? Here are short concrete examples:

- Chat Communities were 'the thing' until MySpace came.

- MySpace was 'the thing' until Facebook came. People's usage shifted.

- Facebook was 'the thing' until..? Who knows. But they're coming.

Because these online entities weren't imagined to be pay-per-use from the getgo, they have generated a "for free" usage habit within consumers. As time passed, this usage habit came to dictate the value of their contents - zero. Now that the Facebooks and Twitters of this world are looking at ways to monetize themselves, their are left trying to fight the User Prerogative Factor -- or, trying to find how to create "new usage that is worth something, because it moves the current web habits up a notch.

While "paid or free" could be a UPF, you might also have the "private or public" UPF, or the "static or animated" UPF, and so on.

A High UPF index would mean that people would not agree to lose the prerogative they have gained over common usage, while a low UPF index would mean that people wouldn't mind losing their prerogative in favor of something better -- for example, a product or service which hasn't been democratized yet, or with added features, or which is very niched.

High UPF example: Twitter
Low UPF example: FireEagle

A freemium would be low UPF, because the core principle is to provide "paid-for" added value that is niched within an already "free service". People would consider paying because it brings their usage habit up a notch.

Twitter giving companies money to sell their premium-content tweets and taking a cut from sales, would raise a very high UPF -- people are currently doing this for free, regardless of content.

In summing things up: are you doomed if you extra-popular site has a high UPF? Of course not. (Google knows something about that). But it means you have to dig up a lot of usage insights about your service, in order to find solutions that will lower your UPF.

We'll talk more about solutions in the next article. In the meanwhile and as always, let me know your thoughts.

|

I've taken the time to finally move AdKrispies to the latest Blogger platform. About time you say? Heck yeah.

Hope you like the new platform. I should make good use of it in the weeks to come, so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading!

Yours truly,

David

|

Yes folks, Adkrispies will be under maintenance for the next two weeks at least; since I can't really hide it from the public eye you'll probably be barging in as the actress is getting made up.

In the meanwhile, please take 5 minutes to subscribe to the community using the tab on the right, and check back older posts!

You regular kosmic krunchies should be back after the changes, in a newfound beauty.

Cheers,

David @ Adkrispies

|