Bob Cringley, of PBS.org column “I, Cringley” lets loose what he’s been up to with two titans of hard disk design:

Next year we’ll see hard drives that use metal foil platters that are smaller, more heat resistent, more shock resistent, and consume 30% less power for roughly 50% the current cost.

Tree huggers will love what this will do to power consumption, decreasing fossil fuel usage and global warming by decreasing the amount of carbon in the air.

Everyone else will enjoy longer battery life, and more memory in their newly impact resistent laptops, mp3 players, and digital cameras.

The loser here? Flash memory. Flash was good because it is faster, more bulletproof and less power hungry than current hard-drives. Take that away and for anything For anything over 2GB, these drives are just too cheap.

Aside from flash manufacturers (most of whom also manufacture disk drives) this seems like one of those odd advances in technology that has no real downside.

Read the whole column here: Shameless Self-Promotion: Bob’s Disk Drive

Technorati Tags: disruptive, energy, harddrives, technology

How agencies are really run:
Small Agency Diary:Three principals give you the skinny on the battles they fight, the clients they win, the questions they ask themselves and how they maintain, motivate, and grow a creative workforce and clientbase.

Profound and immediately useful in 1 minute or less:
ksblog: If you plan on talking to anyone or making money during your life, especially as a marketer, KS is worth a read. She’s smart, witty, profound, and BRIEF. If brevity is the source of wit, she’s got it in spades.

[Update: K now has her own blog at clientk.com. This is still the only blog that I read and star almost every entry.]

Proof that advertising podcasts don’t suck:
American Copywriter: Two guys in Kansas City. Fun. Human. Hilarious. Feel like I’ve known them for years. Good blog. Great podcast.

Technorati Tags: advertising, rss, toread

www.jacksonpollock.org

“Maybe the best creative you’ll do today.” via American Copywriter

Technorati Tags: art, inspiration

I have a 12″ Powerbook. About two months ago, it started acting really slow. It was taking 45 seconds to register a mouseclick. It stopped booting up on the first try. Not good. I booted from the Mac OS X install DVD which lets you run several utilities, including Disk Utility and Terminal.

When I launched Disk Utility instead of:

SMART Status:Verified

I was greeted with:

SMART Status: Failing. Backup any unsaved work if drive not totally failed yet.

Luckily, I had backups of almost everything already. What wasn’t backed up already, I was able to copy to my external hard-drive via the Terminal. I have Applecare so I took my computer there and they replaced the drive, took them about a week. If I didn’t have those backups…years of work would have been lost.

So all you Mac users, here are some steps to ward off disaster:

1. Install SMARTReporter .It will proactively monitor your hard drives and alert you to any problems, maybe even in time to avert disaster. Disk Utility only runs when you ask it to.
2. Print My Mac Won’t Start - A Tiny Troubleshooting Guide. It will tell you what to do when your Mac is acting funny. I keep mine in my laptop sleeve and it saved me by telling my how to boot from CD, External Drive, how to check a disk, etc
3. Backup. Backup. Backup. Have more than two copies of your photo library. Email yourself important documents. Burn CDs and DVDs. Just think about if it was gone.
4. Be Redundant. You can mirror your hard drive to an external drive with a free program called Carbon Copy Cloner or the commercial and very good SuperDuper! or Chronosync. Both are well worth the $30 they cost and provide more functionality and a friendlier interface. If your drive dies, you can boot from the external drive and continue like nothing happened. (Just hold down Option while your booting and it will let you pick which drive to boot from.)

Note: Hard drives are mechanical devices. Given enough time, they will all fail. I have seen drives fail straight out of the box, and I see others still running fine after 10 years. Some fail slowly, others in the blink of a power surge. You can’t predict when they’ll die, so you had better always be prepared for the funeral.

Technorati Tags: technology

A few months ago, I was listening to a lecture and looked down to to jot something in my notebook. When I looked up I was half a beat behind and had missed the first part of what seemed to be a rather important statement.

My mind said, “Just hit the replay button.”

What is alarming is not the 1/2 second thought, but that for the next 1/2 second, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable course of action. The DVR replay button does not, of course, work in “real” life, but having a DVR has so changed my relationship to media and information consumption that it had worked itself into my subconscious.

A few weeks later, at home watching TV with my two roommates and a friend, we caught up to the DVR “tape delay” (when you start a show late and can thus fast-forward through bad commercials). There was a moment of awkward silence as we endured a cheesy commercial for god knows what. Our friend whined loudly “I HATE Live TV, why can’t you just fast-forward it, you have DVR!”

She didn’t even have a DVR and she had DVR angst. I related the story of my DVR moment. Instead of the expected laughter all three replied, “Thank GOD, I thought I was the only one!”

You’re not alone.

Technorati Tags: dvr, technology, video

Verizon Wireless has framed the debate for the last several months that wireless service is all about the network and we’ve been bombarded with armies of technicians following families around. Features and phones are important, but “The only reason to pick a wireless company is the network.” This works nicely with Verizon’s overall reputation of crappy customer service, but the best overall coverage.

Cingular responded, betting that research claiming it has the fewest dropped calls would resonate. The specify this both nationally and at the local level. (”Fewest Dropped Calls in the SF Bay Area”). Depending on user experience, this could tip the scales in the direction of Cingular using Verizon’s own toolbox.

Sprint has stayed out of the voice debate in this area (although in the Bay Area, my experience is that Sprint will work where nothing else will). Instead, they have upped the ante, going after higher value and earlier adopter users with mobile internet.

In SF Sprint claims to have the “Strongest Wireless Broadband Signal in SF” which is a claim that’s probably more important to more people in this market than elsewhere. Separate, but part of the same campaign, they use print and TV to slam Cingular’s EDGE as slow and outdated.

Verizon and Cingular are unusually quiet on the subject, which is especially odd given how they are pushing their EDGE and EVDO Smart Phones and PC-Cards.

Is Sprint poised to take over this emerging market? Are the others willing to stay as peripheral players given that they know WiMax is just around the corner and their networks won’t be able to handle it without huge capital outlay whereas Sprint is good to go?

I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we start to see more focus on wireless broadband in the next month or so, and for a Christmas-season firesale on EVDO, EDGE, and other Wireless Broadband devices.

Technorati Tags: advertising, cingular, sprint, verizon

This is another instance of one brand staking a claim on something and framing the debate within the sector and the consumers mind.

About 6 weeks ago, I started seeing billboards and hearing radio ads for Sutter Health’s TheDoctorForYou.com. Based on the premise that, as partner in your well-being, you should be comfortable with your doctor and that different patients have different needs and preferences. TheDoctorForYou.com allows you to find a doctor based on proximity, languages spoken, gender, specialty, and hospital/plan affiliation.

Most health plan websites have a similar feature but where Sutter’s succeeds is in its blinding simplicity. It’s dedicated to a single purpose, doesn’t ask any personal questions, and gets answers quickly. I can imagine it becoming a great tool for current customers and potential ones as they navigate the treacherous waters of the U.S. private healthcare system.

Two weeks ago, I heard another radio commercial for another HMO talking about doctor choice, I don’t remember which. The offering struck me rather than the brand: “Just like Sutter…”

Last week, Kaiser Permanente announced, in the enthralling voice of Allison Janney (she’ll always be C.J. to me), that Kaiser also wants you to find the doctor that works best for you. Where they drop the ball, however, is not having a trackable, single issue oriented site. They direct you to www.kaiserpermanente.org.

I went to the website for comparison purposes and when asked who I was, I chose “Prospective Member” and was prompted to pick my location and then fill out an application. Not what I wanted to do. Next, I lied and said I was a current member. After way too many clicks, I finally got to where I could search for a doctor only to be told that my browser security settings were incompatible with the site and to call one of 50 phone numbers listed. Not good.

In Sum: Sutter has re-framed the debate for HMOs and done a good job providing a simple benefit that will make peoples lives and healthcare decisions easier. Kaiser, while I love their Thrive campaign fell short trying to get this one out the door. No url, no link on the homepage, too many clicks, and ultimately a broken experience.

Technorati Tags: advertising

After receiving a brief from account and reading it:

“So how does this brief thing help me make an ad?”

Technorati Tags: advertising, quote

Takeaway: Don’t Ignore AOL for Viral Video

I’ve been working on a marketing campaign at Rassak Experience that includes several parody videos. The videos, as well as being hosted on the a microsite were also posted to YouTube and AOL Uncut.

We uploaded the videos on the same day with the same descriptions and the same tags. The graph below compares AOL views (red) with YouTube views (blue).

[Side Note:, We did try to post to both Google Video and Yahoo Video but had so many problems it wasn’t worth dealing with. Google had just acquired YouTube and uploading was broken. Once fixed, we had A/V sync issues with the Google encoder. At Yahoo, 4 videos posted immediately, the other 6 took up to 2 full days to appear.  When they did appear, 2 were broken and the rest were posted with a thumbnail of a girl in a bikini rather than a still from our own video so we deleted them.]

Technorati Tags: advertising, aol, youtube, statistics, video, viral

Pantone doesn’t advertise it, but they offer a 20% student discount on all graphics products. That beats the best deals on eBay or anywhere else for new stuff, but you have to CALL them at 866-PANTONE.

Everyone else can get a 10% through the creativepro affiliate store on Pantone.com if they join creativepro.com.

Also, they just introduced the Uncoated Color Bridge and you can get a Color Bridge set which includes both Coated and Uncoated at a special price.