Radar Waves

Shouldn't Google Be Better At Synergy?

Normally, its hard to argue against Google's technology and thought leadership. But a recent check of my spam folder uncovered the fact that for months now, my Google alerts have been nestled among emails from my Nigerian Banker friends and underendowed men in my spam folder - on Gmail. Shouldn't a Google mail product be able to recognize its own opt-in emails?

Google calendar is down

See for yourself:
http://www.google.com/calendar

Not cool, esp given that 3rd party publishers such as Netflix have recently begun using it as a marketing and customer relations platform. Not to mention that I use it as my own primary calendar...

Hoax alert: From the annals of misunderestimation: the PC circa 2004

I love this photo of RAND corporation's mock-up (in 1954) of what a home computer might look like in 2004. As a professional prognosticator, I'm used to getting things wrong, but so far I don't think I've ever gotten anything this wrong. Kind of makes me feel better about my digital music projections circa 1999.

Thanks for the pic, Masha!

UPDATE: Speaking of getting things wrong, I've been duped! Wally Baer, former RAND guy, says:

Sorry to disappoint, aram, but the picture is an urban legend hoax that
circulates every few months or years and has nothing to do with RAND  It's
actually a montage of several images, as described at

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

However, it's certainly apropos to your interest in remix.

Wally

Variety's Eulogy: The Death of VHS

We all knew it was dying, Variety provides the euology for VHS. Who knew loneliness could kill a technology? Well, that and retailers sounding the death knell: "no longer shelf space." Here's to a fruitful afterlife on ebay, where it will be reunited with its friends Betamax (surely the two have mended their relationship by now), Colecovision and a large collection of laserdiscs.

Napster CTO weighs in on Zune

Napster CTO Bill Pence has written a pretty cogent answer to critics' concerns that Zune signals the end of Microsoft's support for its PlaysforSure DRM format (and therefore for the digital music subscription industry as we know it). He argues that Microsoft has every reason to develop Zune and PlaysforSure in parallel, the way they do XBOX and PC games.

Interestingly, the piece also has a thinly-veiled threat to Microsoft: abandon PlaysforSure, and the music industry may abandon DRM in return (fat chance, but I like his moxy):

the disappearance of an open platform could spell the end of DRM technology altogether, at least for digital music. Since I believe strongly that the market in the end must and will be based on interoperable digital formats, if DRM is used to erect barriers to that goal, then there is no question it will be swept aside, and the industry may end up with what many have believed was the obvious choice from the beginning: open MP3 files.

I still hold out hope for Arrested Development

So MSN scored the syndication rights to Arrested Development, the first time a television show has turned to the Web to sell syndication rights. (HDNet and G4 scored the HD and basic cable rights, respectively). MS plans to stream the episodes for free, with an ad supported model. While details on the terms of the deal are sketchy at best (three years exclusive but no mention of money), I have to wonder if there may be a hope for Family Guy-style resurrection in the works. Perhaps I'm just unable to accept the idea of AD gone forever, and I'm grasping at straws, but its not inconceivable that AD might find a larger and more loyal audience online and on demand. (FOX did the show a disservice by constantly moving it around on the schedule). Sure, resurrecting an animated show three years after its cancellation is probably much easier than wrangling a live-action cast back into production, but a girl can dream, can't she? The viral power of the Internet, the ability to watch these shows for free and on demand, the proven popularity of video online - maybe all these factors will conspire to create a larger AD phenomenon online that FOX (or HBO, or Showtime, etc) will take note of - because watching the DVDs just isn't enough for me. I need my Bluths now.

Fun with Google Trends: Pirates vs. Superman

pirates    superman   

   

I've been avoiding writing my dissertation (and a few ongoing Radar projects) by futzing around with Google Trends all day.

Here's what I can't figure out: As everyone in the media-saturated world knows by now, Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean totally smashed Warner's Superman Returns in terms of opening weekend gross B.O., with $135M vs. $76M - nearly twice as much. And, as the bottom half of the chart above shows, press for Pirates seems to have outstripped press for Superman (although Pittsburgh Pirates game coverage probably plays a role in that). Yet Google searches for "superman," which had been in a dead heat with searches for "pirates" until this spring, suddenly leapt up when the movie hype started. I know all those people aren't searching for Nietzschean philosophy, so it's gotta be the movie.

I welcome any and all analyses here. How can Pirates win the box office and hype races, yet lag behind Superman when it comes to Google searches?

Youtube NOT hacked

I stand corrected, although apparently YouTube's cryptic message confused a few of us:

YouTube: Our humor, not our hack

update Engineers at video upload site YouTube.com played a practical joke on fans late Thursday evening as they prepared to roll out new site features.

 

YouTube, which hosts homemade videos, took down the site and posted a cryptic and grammatically incorrect place-holder message written in capital letters: "All your video are belong to us."

The inability to get on to the site and the poor grammar, a likely reference to a poorly translated video game that evolved into an animated Web phenomenon some years ago, had some YouTube fans believing that the site had been hacked. At around 10:45 p.m. PT, an additional sentence appeared that let confused users in on the hoax: "No, we haven't be hacked. Get a sense of humor."

Sure, the message made me laugh, but would it have been that hard for YouTube to add a line referring to the site maintenance? humor is all well and good, but reliable, honest customer service goes a long way to building goodwill.

Youtube hacked?

what do you get when you combine hackers, an Internet meme spawned by video game Engrish, and the world's most popular viral video site?

I'm chuckling but I doubt Chad Hurley is right now.

Modding a "dog whistle" for teens

We love MIT's advertising lab blog, because its unearths all that is wacky, wonderful and weird in the world of marketing and media. they also tend to find an advertising angle for new technology, even when there isn't one readily apparent.

so this one was a leap for them, but of interest to us, since it involves modding a technology used to control and manipulate teens behavior (essentially a "dog whistle" only teens can hear, used to keep them from loitering outside of stores) and co-opted it for their own use. Since most people under 20 can't hear the tone, a few tech-savvy and resourceful teenagers recorded the sound and have been virally spreading it amongst teens as a ringtone. Since ringtones must be turned off while at school, these allow students to hear their phones ringing - right in front of their unsuspecting teachers.

talk about turning the tables on technology. love it.