But while tablets have added size and with it greater flexibility of usage to the mobile marketplace still adjusting to the entrance of smartphones, does their rapid adoption also represent the beginning of a wave of new touchscreen-enabled devices?   Will we finally get the web-enabled refrigerator?  More likely the success of tablets and the rapid development of custom applications delays or even negates the allure of connected appliances.  Why bother building (or paying for) multiple connected devices when the one you carry around with you daily can predict what you need to buy at the grocery this week or that your prescription is due for refilling.

Delivering great digital marketing and solutions just became infinitely more complex and interesting thanks to the embrace of non-keyboard-and-mouse computing, but I don’t expect our designers will have to worry about what else consumers would like to interact with while shaving for some time.

An agency that is in the business of consumer marketing starting a site where consumers encourage each other to actually ignore advertising and listen to each other instead? Sounds paradox? We think no.

Good advertising these days needs to treat customers as grown-ups, not as believe-anything lemmings. Thanks to social media people find out sooner or later if a brand is trying to blow sand in their eyes or if it has a good reason to let ad agencies tout their horns. Being a user advocate and marketer at the same time is therefore a very natural thing, because it teaches us to understand and communicate the intrinsic value of a product and then create the right message. A bit like in the good old Coca-Cola advertising days, only a lot richer, and with a mobile, social and soon 3D–twist to it ;-).

Or maybe the better movie reference is Kramer vs. Kramer, with marketers in a continuing and epic struggle with users over who, exactly, owns, controls, and can use personal data. It’s not clear who’s winning that battle, and users have ever-more-clever weapons at their disposal: they’ve learned to block cookies, to weasel out of providing real email addresses, and to browse the web incognito.

Lately, they’ve even decided that “there oughta be a law for that.”

On the heels of reports that Apple’s popular iPhone was programmed to track its location and report that data back to Cupertino, and continuing criticisms of Facebook — and now Google — for how those companies store and mine user’s online data, Senator Rockefeller of West Virginia has introduced a “Do-Not-Track Online” bill that would limit how firms can track users’ behavior — the fourth of similar bills to be introduced nationally.

Undoubtedly, marketing messages that are tailored to a user’s interests, behavior and location can offer real value. Smart advertisers, however, understand that this messaging must offer a real and realizable value proposition bound in time and space by the specific value proposition, must fit within the user’s context of use, and must respect the user’s intimacy gradient.

Which means that before you decide to store your customers’ location data on your server for, like, ever, you should decide to offer your users’ a real and explicit value for doing so. Before you decide to add your voice to a cacophony of carnival barkers, you should wonder if your audience is in fact at a carnival, or simply strolling through a mall. And before you decide to announce within a public forum your shoppers’ recent underwear purchases, you should remember that they’re called unmentionables for a reason.

Ham-fisted messaging and butterfingered data custodianship won’t just erode your messaging. They’ll become your message.

Today, Facebook is everywhere. And recently, Facebook and Warner Bros. formed a partnership, which aims to offset the decline of DVD sales faced by Warner Bros.  Though the price to watch a movie via Facebook is higher when compared to services offered by Netflix and Redbox, there is somewhat of a competitive edge.  Warner Bros. is exclusively offering “The Dark Night” and “Inception” virtually on-demand via Facebook for $3.  This marketing proposition has definitely raised some eyebrows (I am sure) at Netflix and also Amazon.com, which recently entered the on-demand movie-watching arena too.

Gone are the days in which only one marketer could offer a unique selling proposition and/or service.  The digital age is continuously shifting marketing tactics and strategies for marketers, especially when consumers hold the consumption power at the click of a few buttons 24-7.  Although I have not tried the Facebook on-demand movie-watching service yet, I am curious to try it.  Hopefully, my anticipation is fulfilled.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/darkknight

We’re on the cusp of a further transformative set of tools and technologies, and like the early internet some of us are already living in the future disrupted world: cheap, fast reproduction of THINGS.

This kid’s ready for that world:

This woman is constructing a company that lives in that world:

(her husband also wrote a book that could serve as a Rough Guide to that future.)

What’s particularly fascinating is that all the public movement in this field closely follows the technology ur-revolution: the personal computer revolution.

Jobs and Woz started something huge in their garage, and the established entrenched players soon followed suit because there was a new demand. Demand that was created by a bunch of die hard hackers and fan boys, and two guys

in a garage.

Basically, same as these guys

The MakerBot story is fascinating.

Right now the cost of entry is higher than ‘one in every home’. Though the actual cost of making a 3-D printer, whether a kit or self sourcing your parts, is comparable to a mid-range computer, the skills needed to assemble are (sadly) not necessarily considered common, and the range of uses and social expectations of just having one aren’t there, yet. No killer apps for those who aren’t just jazzed at the idea of printing their own action figures.

Parallel to the personal fabricator trend are sites like Thingiverse, which is a clearinghouse of things to print on your fab. It’s the software for the machine, the model for a potential source of killer apps.

And of course, this is all now OLD NEWS

So aside from raw materials, what packaged goods will we actually buy or sell? What industries start to fade, and what dependent ecosystems does that disrupt?

It's not just a great lunch truck, it's a lunch truck with an amazing Twitter feed.

I don’t usually go to lunch trucks… in fact, I can’t really remember the last time I bought lunch at a truck before the Taim Mobile showed up on 51st Street.  Fortunately for me, I live near the Taim Falafel & Smoothie Bar, which I stumbled upon on a hidden little street in the West Village last year.  Taim means ‘tasty’ in Hebrew and from all the reviews online it looks like anyone who tries Taim agrees it is very tasty.

The first day I saw the truck outside our building I asked them how often they would be on our street, they handed me a business card with their website and Twitter address and told me ‘that depends on how well we do here.’  I was thrilled that my favorite falafel was now available outside our office and I was eager to spread the word to my co-workers to make this location become part of Taim’s regular rotation.

Now that I’ve signed up for their twitter feed I know when they are coming to our street and it has become a special event.  I tell everyone in the office when it’s falafel day.  The Twitter feed also includes the special of the day and, since it’s gotten so popular, they now send updates on when the line is open or when they run out of food.  The Twitter feed also provided a connection through all the snow days so that I knew when they couldn’t make it in to the city.

The food is amazing, which keeps me coming back and spreading the word, but the Twitter feed keeps me looking forward to my next encounter with the Taim Mobile.

http://www.taimmobile.com/
http://www.facebook.com/thetaimmobile