Month: January 2006

honda civic spot

confessions of a pixel pusher internet marketing media

a nice spot from W+K London for Honda.

As a flash player movie. The usual sad story:

I think the concept is brilliant.

It got implemented alright, although not appropiately: I am not sure about that the frozen car in the middle for instance).
Imagine for a few seconds what Frank Budgen would have done with this spot.

I like that they did a 120 again. Of course by now it’s the trend:
cog, hate, bravia: they all use the new format at least in the time dimension.

Aside-1: Nobody really used the freedom of aspect ratio yet. It always takes years for people to understand and use change.

Aside-2: I hope that they get it and make decent cinema commercials out of these overlong web edits. All of them would work great. Did the Bravia have a cinema media buy?

Then they have ‘viral’ intentions. And that’s usually when things fall down. Sony thought they needed to put things into a zip file for Bravia. Lame. W+K has an IP address and a flash player for the movie. YouTube and google also use this player.

It is a shame that Apple messed up and was unable to put quicktime in this place. Now we have to live with the wrong flat color and weird resizing artefacts. And with the fact that its’ tricky to download.

Google video:

I thought they would not get it all. It gets slowly better. Of course nobody will ever buy any contentfrom them. I think that Apple and Google are in for a surprise: there is no 2 dollar clip market.

Maybe G&A think that if you can make billions with ringtones that you might be able to monetize something a bit more meaningful like clips. I am not an expert on the ringtones thing, but isn’t it that it’s somewhat tricky to get free ringtones? The default costs money. Clips are different. There is ample free content.

Which is where google video starts to become better. I like that you can copy paste links:

THAT is something that W+K should have done for their “Viral”.
It’s easy and it respects the laws and dynamics of the internet.

Maybe next time. Or in five years. Ideas take time.

update:
there is a quicktime / mpeg4 Version that looks so much better.

update2:
There is also an iTunes video cast Version with a 3 part “making of”. Maybe that campaign has more depth than was initially visible from that one link I found everywhere.

update3:
it work’s
digg, del.icio.us the whole nine yards. I am sure boingboing will follow. They are late these days.

vilodex the wiki

confessions of a pixel pusher internet media

vilodex has a wiki now

In theory this might be a good idea. What comes from it we will see.

buy and destroy

internet media

the independent writes about MySpace, Murdoch and YouTube

He paid 0.6 Billion for the site. Then he started altering content secretly. At least thats what the article says. If that is true and should continue, then I am very very curious how long it would take for a competitor to come up with a different site.

Yes, there is the ‘power of default’, and how many kids do really care about this kind of cheating from Murdochs side? Interesting question. It will show much of “Web 2.0” will be left once the big money interests are done with it.

the chain of events;

1. Some service is what people want and becomes huge
2. Somebody arrives in a Learjet and drops billions
variation MySpace:
3. Corpogreed kicks in, and the the very asset that they bought for all that money evaporates
my desired outcome:
4. People show this kind of behaviour the finger. They go somewhere else, and the person
in (2.) bought a really expensive domain name. Like “broadcast.com”

We will see.
The article ends with the mentioning that Murdoch gave Jeremy Philips 1 Billion US$ for future acquisitions. He is 31 and head of News Corp internet strategy or something. Bubble Bubble Bubble.

firefox on the mac

internet

Firefox 1.5: nothing works better than with the 1.0 I had on my Mac. Nothing I would notice.
But things are less stable.

And suddenly pdf files only wanted to open with the ‘default’ Acrobat reader after a Firefox download.
Normal OS X associations were fine, nothing in the Firefox preference pane, nothing in the about:config
I downloaded the Rc Default Apps system extension and it did not have anything set to Adobe Acrapobat. FINALLY installing a program from 2003 called Misfox did the trick. There I found the connecting in question. Changing it, and then launching firefox again did indeed fixed it. Convoluted, too convoluted, if you ask me.

this page helped eventually.

push push push

internet media technology

CES breaks loose in Las Vegas, and a big and involuntarily sigh of relief escapes me:

“Finally some content for the internet”

Video! Great, from Google; Music from the lovely M&M combo via ‘Urage’.

It got kind of boring out here on the net. All those TV episodes
and music files to pay for is what was missing. Now I realize.

And if you have a Windows PC, then you can have not only Microsoft
and anybody in Russia with an IQ above 87 on your machine. No,
also Google can be part of the party on your hard drive now:

With the aptly named GooglePack comes GoogleUpdate which will
provide you update versions of anything that they think might be good
for you.

how to kill the iPod dominance

Apple

Anil Dash gives a couple of bullet points how the reign of the iPod could be ended. 80% of them are valid and will work. Which is better than what happend so far: 5% worked, and that was coincidence.

If Creative, Sony, Phillips and all other still suck in a year from now then they can not say they didn’t know what to do:

Somebody told them.

cinema commericals

confessions of a pixel pusher history media

In this recent ars technica article the author writes that cinema commercials grossed 315 Million US in 2003. Which would make it the 3rd biggest movie of that year. Right between Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean. Sounds big, of course. But when you sum up the ten biggest movies then you get close to 2 Billion. It’s fair to say that movie theatres ruin everybodies experience for less a fraction of their income.

Let me say that I made good money with cinema commericals: Software that I wrote for a “Solitaire” Film Recorder provided plenty of content for the european cinema market in the nineties. Mostly commmericals. A cinema commercial can actually a decent piece of entertainment. It’s just that most of them are not. The worst is always when a quick edited TV commercial gets pushed into the cinema. Mostly out of media buy consideration: “Let’s get that cinema demographic”. This afterthought shows: The content is not meant to be seen on the ‘big screen’ and that causes troubles that will ruin everybodies experience. You can not sell things when the whole presentation looks like junk.

The overall ‘junkification’ of the cinema experience will cost the more and more viewers. Which is a shame.
A decent cinema can provide amazing images and sound. I still prefer to see a movie in a decent Theatre.
Just that they are hard to find these days.

apple laptop durability

Apple

Macintouch did an extensive laptop durability study

Since my PowerBook6,7 is working mostly fine I think I will not replace it with an early IBook. Easier on the money, it’s not to slow, and hell, if I see the new ones I probably want to have one anyway. This talk is still cheap right now.

google.de kaputt, so is Karstadt.de

google umlautfrei

Tomorrow we will drive 40 miles to the next city to do some offline shopping. Who cares? I know, nobody. But these little chores give you an interesting glimpse on the state of things. In Germany shops can’t just be open when they like to be. As crazy as it sounds there is a Ladenschlusszeiten gesetz where more than 3000 words define when stores can be open or closed in Germany. It used to be simple that stores would close at 6:30 pm. Which was real helpful when I was young: It got me out of bed to return some empty beer bottles and get new ones. Sometimes I missed it. That was a long time ago, and there was a revision of the law. Of course it is still regulated, but not really simple when stores are open and when they are not. After all this is Germany: if you want to consume then you have to obey some rules. There need to be rules. Germans love their rules.
Back to the shopping trip: The biggest department store in Germany is called Karstadt. Think Sears blended with Macy’s. They usually occupy a big chunk of the inner city. My wife googles

karstadt bremen oeffnungszeiten

Which should do the trick: karstadt is a very very rare name, only being used for the store. Bremen happens to be the city that the store is in. And oeffnungszeiten is german for “shop hours”. The results are complete spam. 100%.
Not one page in the right direction.

Karstadt has a website. But they seem to prefer to pay google money to be listed in the search results. Not a single result is from their own site.

The only question that remaings: Who is more broken, ‘google.de’ or ‘Karstadt’ .
Probably both.

google.de is as messed up as Apple Germany. They always have been a total pain to deal with.
I think they manage to tell their US motherships that it’s Germany’s fault that they have no success. Easier than actually getting something done here.

What might be the next google at the ‘big daddy data center’ does show the same amount of spam and junk.
Different junk, but the actual website of Germany’s biggest department store is equally missing.

cringley is an idiot

google history internet

or maybe I am one.
Last November Robert X Cringley writes about a google project.
He claims that Google is planning to put 5,000 opteron CPUs and 2.5 Petabytes in a 20 or 40 foot container.

Back in November the story got attention, and now it bubbles back up again in the context of the “Google PC Walmart CES” buzzword cluster.

I wondered if the “Cringleytainer” would actually be feasible:

Those pieces would barely fit in a 40 foot container. Forget about air flowing around. Maybe it’s all water cooled?

Which leads to the ultimate flaw in Cringley’s concept:
5,000 CPUs @ 90 W and 30,000 disks @ 15 W would use 0.9 Megawatt. Let’s add 0.1 Megawatts for boards and powers supplies. Of course this would assume a couple of technology breakthroughs.
Ignoring the laws of thermo dynamics we have to add the same power to cool the thing: 2 Megawatts.

Googling around I found this power source for the Cringleytainer. Guestimating optistically again it would use a gallon of diesel every minute.

Of course Mr Cringley is not an idiot. Not more or less than anybody else. I am only certain that I am one,
since I had to spend so much time with me.

What strikes me is that such a story can float around without anybody doing the basic math. Or maybe people did and got ignored. It’s much more ‘news worthy’ to toss around crazy ideas involving google.

If I should be bored in mid March then I will try to inject the urban myth of a planned Apple Google merger into the world.