Toyota has apologized for @camryeffect

Claudia Yuskoff alerted me that Toyota has, in fact, apologized for the @camryeffect tweets that I talked about here and here. The apology appears as a comment to Drew Olanoff's The Next Web post. (The apology has also been added to both of my previous posts, and to Steven Hodson's post.) While the apology was posted by Shand Spencer, it is signed by Kimberley Gardiner, National Digital Marketing & Social Media Manager, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. Inc.

shandspencer

We apologize to anyone in the Twitterverse who received an unwanted @reply over the past few days. We were excited to share the message of our Camry Effect campaign in a new way and it was never our intention to displease anyone.

We’ve certainly learned from this experience and have suspended the accounts effective immediately to avoid any additional issues.

Kimberley Gardiner, National Digital Marketing & Social Media Manager, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. Inc.

Now the @camryeffect tweets are protected

[3:39 PM - TOYOTA HAS APOLOGIZED.]

If you were to go visit the @camryeffect Twitter account right now, this is what you'd most likely see.



Why is this significant?

Because about an hour ago, if you went to the @camryeffect Twitter account, this is what you would have seen:



Yup, you could have scrolled through hundreds of similar-sounding tweets that @camryeffect was sending to people who mentioned any Super Bowl-related topic. And there were a bunch of other Twitter accounts - @camryeffect1, @camryeffect2, @camryeffect3, etc. - that were doing the same thing.

Unfortunately for Toyota and its advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, this did not meet with a warm response. Drew Olanoff of The Next Web wrote about it. Steven Hodson of the Inquisitr wrote about it. John Bredehoft of Empoprises (that's me) wrote about it. And a bunch of people are tweeting about it.

So for those who believe in the power of social media to change the world, what did the negative reaction do?

Well, the accounts haven't been closed down. And as Steven Hodson and Kristi Colvin have noted, they probably won't be.

And so far, Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi haven't apologized, as far as I know.

All that they've done is hide the evidence. Sort of - the screen captures that Hodson and I made show what they were doing, and certain Twitter searches will show the tweets that they sent, such as this one from @CamryEffect5:

@Andre_B87 We're excited for Sunday's commercials too! Shazam ours or enter online for a chance to win a Camry: bz.lo.cr/I2D

And you can't see the two (only two) people that @camryeffect follows any more, but as I previously noted, one of those two people happens to be an employee of Saatchi & Saatchi. No idea whether this person is connected with the Twitter campaign, or with any part of the campaign, but I'm monitoring his account to see if he says anything about the spam. So far he's said nothing.

Of course, the big boys can practice bad advertising also - see @CamryEffect

[3:39 PM - TOYOTA HAS APOLOGIZED.]



And, as Drew Olanoff notes, this is just one of several "Camry Effect" Twitter accounts that are responding to any mention of Super Bowl-related topics.

However, in the last hour of so - possibly because of Drew's post and possibly because of anger expressed elsewhere - none of the accounts has tweeted anything.

But it may be too late, because Toyota (and "Camry Effect" creator Saatchi & Saatchi) are being discussed on Twitter. Unfortunately, it's not good discussion. Kristi Colvin:

I wonder who the brilliant mind behind @CamryEffect and @CamryEffect1, @CamryEffect2, @CamryEffect3, @CamryEffect4, @CamryEffect5 et all is.

Jason Keath:

Dear Toyota, Spamming Twitter is not a social media strategy

I think it's fair to say that these aren't the types of responses that Toyota wanted to get from this promotion. Here's what was said a few days ago:

Toyota is extending "The Camry Effect" on the Super Bowl this weekend. The automaker is adding a sweepstakes element activated by a smartphone app to an ad that will air on the Super Bowl that extends a Camry-hagiography campaign that launched last fall to promote the 2012 version of the car.

The new chapter of the campaign, called "Connections," involves smartphone app Shazam, and allows people to vie for a chance to win a Camry or gift one to a friend....

A spokesperson for Toyota's AOR Saatchi & Saatchi LA, which developed the campaign, explains that starting Thursday, when the "Connections" commercial runs online, people can "Shazam" the ad. When they do, they are automatically entered for a chance to win the car. She says people can do this every day, including when it airs on TV during the Super Bowl, right after the “Toyota Half Time” report....

The "Camry Effect" is a social media campaign that -- according to Dave Nordstrom, VP of digital marketing at Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. -- is among the most ambitious social media campaigns the company has ever done.

Unfortunately, someone didn't think through the Twitter part of this campaign.

Oh what a feeling...

Why you should never visit the Whole House FM Transmitter website

I thought I had taken care of this recurring, irritating, recurring, irritating, recurring, irritating ad, but I guess I hadn't. Time to set my netbook's phasers to Obliterate.

And apparently at least one person was turned off by the content of the company's ads:

The company website reads too much like a Ronco advertisement to make me comfortable. Is this thing any good?

Of course, different people respond to different types of advertisements. Really old computer ads (and even some ads today) are basically specification sheets. After Apple Computer came on the scene, you had graphic-oriented ads with warm, fuzzy text. And throughout history, we've had the ads that remind you of used car salesmen in loud jackets who've just taken their hourly dose of cough syrup. "WHY WOULD YOU GO ANYWHERE ELSE?!?"

Oh, and if anyone from the Whole House FM Transmitter people sees this post, I found a perfectly acceptable FM transmitter that works fine in my car. Thank you very much. Now go away.

On parking lots

One Sunday morning I went by a Christian church at 9:15 in the morning and saw that the parking lot was nearly empty. Then I remembered that this church periodically had one service on Sunday, rather than its usual two, and that this happened to be one of those Sundays. So instead of a dead church, I saw a sleeping church (since they were sleeping in until 10:00).

As my Facebook friends know, sometimes I'll take a walk during the day. I'll often pass one business in which the cars are double-parked. My walk then takes me to another business further down the street, in which even the reserved spaces aren't all taken, much less the rest of the lot.

How many cars do you see in the parking lots you pass?

Why late adopters and industry forsakers succeed

Art Wittman said the following:

As the PC industry grew up, Apple made advances; IBM made reference designs; and Compaq, Dell, and a pile of others made the money by offering incremental improvements and running the licensed operating system of the day.

And the lesson isn't bound to the 1980s. Wittman extends the lesson to the 21st century. Read here.

Note that the companies that made money in the 1980s are not necessarily the companies that are making money today.

Why? Because most companies, with very few exceptions (Microsoft and IBM come to mind here) can offer good or great performance over multiple decades. And those few companies that continue to succeed do so by reinventing themselves - Microsoft by adopting the Internet, IBM by embracing services and dumping laptops. Apple, which went from success to failure to success, did so by taking the steps to gain market share in a new market - a market outside of the computer market in which it had formally made its mark. (Apple even changed its corporate name.) There are other examples - I doubt that Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (DISCLOSURE: A COMPETITOR OF MY EMPLOYER) has done any mining lately, and there are no lumber mills at today's Nokia.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard (the corporate successor to Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, and several other companies) stumbled and reversed itself. In fact, the title of Wittman's post declares that HP's fired head Apotheker had it right when he tried to jettison HP's personal systems group.

Chances are that thirty years from now, Wittman's stellar corporate examples of today - LG, Samsung, Asus, Lenovo, and the like - will be looked upon as has-been failures, if they even exist. (Many former stars - Compaq, DEC, Tandem, Lotus, EDS, etc. - are long gone.) Unless leaders in those companies are brave enough to say that the old ways aren't working, and that the companies need to transform themselves.

Lircles aren't a privacy tool. They're a noise reduction tool.

First, a definition. I use the word "lircle" (and have used it previously) to refer to a grouping system employed by online communications applications. Examples include Facebook's lists and Google+'s circles - hence the name "lircle."

Among other features, lircles allow you to post a message that is only seen by a particular group of people. For example, maybe you have a lircle for your family. Maybe you have a lircle for your co-workers. Or maybe you have a lircle for people who are part of your alliance for the online game Starfleet Commander.

One can argue that lircles are a privacy-enhancing tool. For example, I could post something to my Starfleet Commander lircle like this:

Hey, maybe we should coordinate an attack on Steeeeeeeeeelrod. If we all do it together, we may be able to bring him down. Who is available at 0600 GMT?

The idea is that if I only post this to my Starfleet Commander alliance lircle, then they will know about it and Steeelrod won't.

Well, if you're counting on lircles to provide you with privacy, please don't.

The Internet is a public medium, and there are any number of ways that your private message to your lircle could suddenly become public. Perhaps someone in my alliance is a traitor, and he/she just copies/pastes my message and sends it off to Steeelrod. Or perhaps Steeelrod has a friend who can hack into my lircle. Or perhaps some twelve year old somewhere is hacking into random places. Or maybe Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin is just about ready to conclude a deal to sell every bit of Facebook or Google data to Donald Trump.

In short, just because you only share something with a limited group of people, you can't assume that it will remain with that limited group of people.

So if lircles aren't good for privacy, then what are they good for?

One benefit of posting something to a lircle is that people outside of the lircle don't have to see it. The vast majority of people don't care about my doings in Starfleet Commander, so any mention of Steeelrod would just be noise to them. Posting to the lircle just reduces the noise.

As an example, let me reproduce a message that I posted to one of my lircles recently:

Last night I shredded the piece of paper that had my G number written on it. Luckily for me, I also have it written on a Post-it Note at work. (Post-it is a registered trademark of 3M.)

This particular message went to a lircle that includes co-workers, former co-workers, and a few customers. It did not go to my family, college friends, high school friends, people at my church, or fellow Starfleet Commander players (well, with two exceptions).

Even some of the people in the lircle who received the message probably didn't understand all of it. For example, former co-workers Stephanie and Lisa probably don't have any idea what a "G number" is, since it's an internal thing that was introduced at my company long after they left. However, since both Stephanie and Lisa previously worked for a large multinational corporation, they can probably guess what a G number is. Large multinational corporations like to set up things like G numbers.

But even if the people in the lircle don't know what a G number is, they certainly understand why I'd write the parenthetical statement that I did. And, since I'm now publicly blogging about this message, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission obligates me to let you in on the secret also. Disclosure time:

[DISCLOSURE: 3M IS A COMPETITOR OF MY EMPLOYER.]

(Note to self: Some time I have to write about co-opetition. NEC and MorphoTrak use of Post-it notes is just the tip of the iceberg here.)

Now most of you who just finished reading the last few paragraphs are probably bored to tears. And I can assure you that if that particular item had been posted publicly, instead of to a limited lircle, most of the people who received the message would also have been bored to tears.

See how lircles can reduce noise?

You're welcome.

P.S. No, I'm not going to tell you my G number. It's...um, private. Unless Post-it notes have super-secret RFID technology that beams their contents to Pasadena. Which could be dangerous, because that same Post-it note that includes my G number also includes some Starfleet Commander coordinates.

Early termination of naming rights - the Kodak Theatre

These days it seems like a popular building can't keep the same name. Because businesses want to make money wherever possible, they'll often sell the naming rights to some company that will pay millions of dollars for the privilege. Then, a few years later when that deal expires, they'll sell the naming rights to some other company.

This can lead to some confusion. Maybe you'll hear an advertisement telling you that your favorite band is going to be playing in the Kia Center. You have no idea where the Kia Center is, until you discover that's the new name for the place that used to be called the Lowes Center, and before that was called the Yahoo Center, and before that was called the First Interstate Center, and before that was called the Marlboro Center.

But sometimes names get changed a little more quickly than expected. Needless to say, any facility named for Enron had to undergo a name change when Enron went under.

And this week a new proposed early name change emerged.

Back in 2002, no one at Kodak saw a problem in buying the naming rights for a theater at Hollywood & Highland in Los Angeles. A twenty year deal costing $75 million - what could go wrong?

The entire photographic industry could undergo a change, that's what. Now Eastman Kodak has declared bankruptcy, and the looming $4 million annual payment doesn't look all that great, so they're trying to give up the naming rights and let someone else buy them.

Coincidentally, the Oscars may not stay at the Kodak Theatre no matter what the name becomes. In fact, there's some scuttlebutt that the Oscars would relocate downtown, to the Nokia Theatre.

Wonder how Nokia will be doing in ten years? I've previously noted that Nokia participates in a pretty cyclical industry. Then again, all industries are cyclical these days. Just ask General Motors.

On Crystal City

Crystal City. The name conjures up magical visions of glimmering edifices.

Because I've been to Crystal City, my view is somewhat different, though no less magical.

I first visited Crystal City as a teenager, when some of my friends lived in the area. Crystal City is a shopping and business complex in Arlington, Virginia, roughly two miles south of the Pentagon (and not too far from the newer "Pentagon City" shopping center that I've discussed before). I didn't go there all that often - my only memory of being there was eating at some fast food place in the complex.

Later I ran across Crystal City in a virtual way. While Larry King is best known for his long-running television show on CNN, he was previously known for a late-night radio talk show. Imagine hearing Larry King's voice in the middle of the night, over the radio. Well, that show originated in Crystal City, as Jim remembers.

Prior to his move to CNN, The Larry King Show was the #1 show carried on The Mutual Broadcasting System and their studios were in Crystal City, Virginia. They produced a variety of shows including coverage of NBA Basketball on "The Mutual Sports Network" but Larry King was always the KING of that network. Does anyone here remember the "bee-doop" audio switching signals Mutual used?

Larry King's Radio Talk Show was carried across the Nation by other Network Stations including my local 3-way (AM / FM / TV) CBS affiliate KIRO, in Seattle, where I worked in AM Radio Engineering.

I haven't been to Crystal City in years. The last time that I went THROUGH Crystal City was in 2007, when my Metro train passed underneath Crystal City on trips between Alexandria and Washington. I haven't been to the complex in years, but I still hear about it, since the Biometrics Identity Management Agency is based (PDF) in Crystal City.

Who decides which information sources are reliable? (A story from Vietnam)

I haven't seen a lot of movies, but one movie that I saw was Good Morning Vietnam, starring Robin Williams as Adrian Cronauer, an Armed Forces disk jockey during the early stages of the Vietnam War. Now we truly had Armed Forces disk jockeys in Vietnam. Pat Sajak was one of them. And Adrian Cronauer was another.

Now movies often take creative license when they cover real events, and Cronauer's story is no different. For example, Cronauer was not kicked out of Vietnam; he left when his tour of duty was over. But Cronauer can't blame anyone for his depiction in the film; after all, he co-wrote the script, and intentionally emphasized its entertainment value.

But much of the film was based on fact, and Cronauer recounted the real details behind one episode in the film.

Cronauer did clash with Army censors once as depicted in the movie. He witnessed the bombing of a restaurant in Saigon, but was not allowed to report the devastation in his radio news broadcast.

``That was based on what happened to the Mekong Floating Restaurant, a boat anchored in the Saigon River near the radio station,`` Cronauer said. ``I had had dinner with friends from the station there the night it was bombed. We might have left, I`d say, 20 minutes before the Viet Cong sprayed the side of the boat with claymore mines. I went back and saw the dead and wounded.

``I couldn`t get any of it on the air. I had personally seen heads severed from torsos. Barring the Second Coming, they were not going to get up and walk away. The duty officer would not give me permission to report it. I asked him why, and the duty officer said he didn`t have official confirmation of this bombing. But I saw it. I was there, I told him. `We don`t have confirmation of it,` he repeated.``

Now this is obviously a special case - the military is noted for its hierarchy, and broadcast restrictions are often expanded in time of war. But in this case, an employee of the organization, presumably a trusted employee, who witnessed an event was not able to talk about it on the air.

But other broadcasters could talk about it:

They had been at the Mekahn Restaurant that [Radio Hanoi broadcaster Nguyen Van] Tung was talking about in his broadcast. The Mekahn was a floating restaurant tied up on the Mekong River dockside in Saigon. The bomb went off about ten o'clock when it was full of customers, many of them Americans. A Claymore mine tied to a tree was detonated three minutes later aimed at the survivors of the first bomb as they clambered down the gangplank toward shore. I arrived about 45 minutes after the blast, just in time to see 40 mangled bodies being loaded into ambulances and the Saigon Fire Department washing rivers of blood off the sidewalk with firehoses. Yes, Hanoi Hannah and her partner Nguyen Van Tung often knew how to invoke the images of war most painful to Americans in Vietnam.

Now Radio Hanoi itself was not exactly a bastion of reliability, but because of its broadcast bias, it would broadcast things that you wouldn't necessarily hear on U.S.-sponsored radio. Mike Roberts recalled:

I remember June 1967, I was sitting in a tent with about thirteen guys from Charlie Company. We were all on mess duty and we were gambling, drinking and having a good timeshootin' craps, talking about the world, man, listening to music and you know one guy kept saying, 'Sshh, sshh, be quiet,' and everybody says what, what, and he says 'There's a riot in Detroit!' I guess the governor called in the troops... there was some loss of life. There was no feeling of, you know, what were they rioting for? What possibly could they want? We all knew what they wanted, you know what I'm saying. So of course we would feel some sort of empathy for the folks back home...the guys in the street who were struggling or rioting.

Armed Forces Radio didn't give you an in-depth account of what was happening?

Hanoi Hannah comes on soon after that, and she knows what guard unit was called in, what kind of weapons were used...you know what I'm sayin'. That's when it starts to hit home.... We knew what kind of fire power and what kind of devastation that kind of weapon can do to people, and now those same weapons were turning on us, you know, our own military is killing our own people. We might as well have been Viet Cong...you know what I'm sayin'? It was just bad news, but Hanoi Hannah picked up on it and she talked about it. And clearly if she knew about it, Armed Forces Radio did too. They knew more than they had broadcasted. That was really the first time I started hearing Hanoi Hannah call upon Blacks, you know, to rethink their situation there. Why are you fighting? You have your own battle to fight in America.


Although Roberts didn't necessarily regard Hanoi Hannah as a trusted source:

But we didn't really see her as our friend...someone who is looking out for our best interest and would keep the Viet Cong from killing us if they had a chance.

At the end of the day, you need to put all of your news sources together, consider their biases, and evaluate them accordingly.

Get to the point, will you, John?

While cleaning out some old e-mails, I ran across my account of an interview in which I participated. During the period in which I was transitioning from my old product manager job to my new proposal writer job, I was videotaped for an interview in which I talked about my product. Here's a portion of my account:

They removed the last two questions, but in their place they asked a question about [another product] and a general one about MorphoTrak. I started to launch into a history of Sagem Morpho and Printrak, but in the interests of time the interviewer asked me to stick to 2009. :)

So I didn't get to talk about butterflies.

P.S. If you didn't listen to Los Angeles radio in the late 20th century, I should note that the post title is derived from something Tim Conway (Senior) said to Jim Healy. You can hear Conway's original here.

So are you boycotting the Super Bowl this weekend?

Just checking.

While the SOPA/PIPA/ACTA opponents don't appear to be ready to boycott Comcast/NBC's broadcast of NFL's Super Bowl, there will be some boycotts this weekend.

Lorno recommended a boycott as part of the Occupy movement.

What better way to impact the 1% than to reduce the amount of people exposed to their ads designed to sell their products which in turn makes cash for the 1%.

However, the majority of people didn't go along with Lorno.

You have got to be kidding? I love the Superbowl. If you enjoy something why would you want to boycott it? Why dont you boycott taking a crap?

Chris Celetti is also considering a boycott, though not because of our evil greedy capitalist society.

This is going to be the first Super Bowl as a conscious human being that I won't watch. I'm going to the movies or something.

Monday of Super Bowl Week is upon us and I'm not sure yet if I'm going to go through with my boycott or not. I know for certain that it's a near-impossible game to watch as a Jets fan.

But will Celetti guarantee not to watch?

(empo-tuulwey) (empo-tymshft) Tomorrow's advance is the day after tomorrow's trash - On Linotype

Take a moment and think about the most futuristic prototype that you've seen recently.

Now think about the day when that miraculous item is a dusty relic.

On July 3, 2011, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of something that no longer exists:

On this date in 1886, the German clockmaker, Ottmar Mergenthaler demonstrated the first Linotype Type Casting Machine at the New York Tribune in New York City, USA. In front of a gathering of printers, newspaper men and reporters, the machine was first put in to production, casting lines of printable type for the Tribune.

At this demonstration, Mergenthaler sat at the machine and cast the first line of type. It is alleged that Whitelaw Reid, the owner of the Tribune, exclaimed "Ottmar! You've done it! A line of type!" A reporter asked what the new machine was called and Reid replied, "Why yes, we do have a name. We are going to call it the Linotype."

This ability to set type one line at a time revolutionized the information industry, enabling blazingly quick responses to events. This was symbolized by the boy standing on a streetcorner shouting "Extra!" to alert passersby that a new newspaper edition was available. This newspaper would recount something that happened mere hours ago!

Such a revolutionary tool had far-reaching effects.

Due to the speed and low cost of printing, literacy dramatically increased as more and more books and newspapers were published.

But a mere hundred years later:

Although these machines were revolutionary, technology began to supersede the Linotype and they were scrapped and melted-down by the thousands. Today, very few machines are still in existence.

And what of the fathers in the 1890s, or the 1920s, or the 1950s, telling their kids to become Linotype operators? Well, those jobs went away, and the knowledge is going away also.

The highly-skilled operators of the Linotype are in a battle against time. If their skills are not passed along to a new generation of operators, the machine will die completely. There is a small group of former operators that want to save the Linotype from the scrap yard, but some see this as a fruitless endeavor.

H/T Laughing Squid, which discussed the documentary Linotype: The Film.

"Linotype: The Film" Official Trailer from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.

3D Printing - Society Changer, or Battleground of Entrenched Interests?

I've been picking up little bits on 3D printing over the past few months, but have never really delved into the topic.

Jake Kuramoto mentioned 3D printing back in July 2011, and subsquently identified it as one of the things he wants to watch in 2012.

And Steven Hodson wrote about it in December 2011.

Again, I didn't really look into it, just kinda thinking: "Oh. Multi-dimensional creation of stuff. Cool."

But others are seeing some potential in it. When I referred Jesse Stay to my post on American workers not being willing to accept Chinese manufacturing practices, Jesse countered with a reference to one of his recent posts on manufacturing. And when he referred me, he made the following statement:

...in 10 years, manufacturing jobs won't exist at all.

Well, naturally I had to read Jesse's post to see how he came up with this conclusion. Here's an excerpt:

I predict, in the not too distant future, not only will you be able to shop, buy, and order phones, devices, and gadgets online (most likely through a mobile device if current trends have their way), but you'll also be able to print those devices out, right in your home, just like you do a piece of paper right now. That's right - the future of manufacturing exists in the homes of every single American, and every person in the world. We won't need those offshore factories in the future! It's an industry that, just like the automotive industry, just like just about any mechanical, human-powered industry, is quickly being replaced by computers!

Stay provided a specific example:

Imagine a world where Apple, like their current factories, made beautiful 3D printers that created their devices in the homes of every customer, instead of building expensive factories in China. Imagine if Apple could reduce that cost, and give complete, full control to the manufacturing process of their phones in the homes of their customers. What if they put one of these in each Apple Store for customers that couldn't buy their own 3D printers?

Now I don't know if Apple would ever do something like this, but I do have to admit the possibility that Apple, notorious for control, may decide that it is in its best interest to outsource production to its own customers. (Assuming, of course, that the technology progresses to the level that it could produce an Apple product.)

But if companies can allow customers to produce AUTHORIZED versions of their products via this technology, then the same technology can be used to...I think you know where this is going. Steven Hodson certainly does:

[W]e hear that The Pirate Bay is opening a new section on their site that will let you download digital files that can be used with 3D printers to create physical goods.

Yes, the Pirate Bay. Some content owners are already mad at the Pirate Bay because it is capable of hosting movies and music. What happens when the Pirate Bay starts hosting virtual versions of other physical products? Hodson explains:

As we as a society struggle to deal with the copyright and trademark fights we are already fighting with the entertainment industry just imagine the battles and political repercussions that we will face when you or I can download a data file, feed it into our personal 3D printer, and within minutes have the same product that a major corporation was trying to sell us a few years ago.

When I read Hodson's post, I immediately conceived my own "for example." Allow me to elaborate.

Recently in my home country, the Federal government spent billions of dollars assisting two companies, General Motors and Chrysler. These two companies are at the top of a large ecosystem of many, many companies who supply parts to them. The Federal government decided that if these two companies were to fail, the repercussions throughout the economy would be catastrophic. And, to put it in terms politicians can understand, a lot of U.S. Representatives, Senators, and even a President could lose future elections unless these two companies were saved.

So General Motors and Chrysler were bailed out, catastrophe was averted, and everyone is happy. Well, almost everyone. But there are a number of politicians from both parties, and a number of company officials, and a number of labor union officials, who are pleased as punch about the healthy American automobile industry.

That is, until some "rogue" Swedish website allows customers to download "illegal" automotive parts, bypassing all of the companies that the Federal government just spent billions of dollars to save.

At that point, Christopher Dodd will stand up and say, "I told you so," and Lamar Smith (or someone like him) will draft legislation to protect our country's economy from rogue foreign websites selling illegal goods and costing us billions of dollars. What the heck - trillions of dollars.

How will it be constructed? Will the sale of 3D printers be regulated? Will the Department of Commerce be required to put tracking devices on 3D printers? Will there be a "patent tax" to ensure that "legitimate" manufacturers get their fair share of "rogue" sales?

Granted that there may be a few years before we have to worry about this in earnest, but it will still be interesting to watch.

Emotional about biometrics ('cause you know sometimes words have two meanings)

[DISCLOSURE: I WORK IN THE BIOMETRICS INDUSTRY. BY THE END OF THIS POST, YOU'LL KNOW WHICH BIOMETRICS INDUSTRY I'M TALKING ABOUT.]

Last October, I wrote a post entitled (empo-tymshft) When words change their meanings - an example from the biometric world. I could have applied the "empo-tymshft" label to this post also, but this particular post pretty much deals with the present day.

Part of my October post was devoted to "the use of biometrics for advertising evaluation by Ipsos." That quote was taken from a press release that discusses the work of Ipsos, a company, in a use of biometrics that differs from what I do day-to-day.

Ipsos has partnered with Boston-based Innerscope Research. Innerscope uses biometrics to understand the full scope of emotional reaction. Biometrics is a fascinating field that measures and analyzes our biological reactions (heart rate, skin conductance, respiration, movement) to decipher the emotional response to any stimulus.

"Biometrics is a branch of neuroscience that takes the measurement of emotions to a deeper level," said Indivar (Indy) Kushari, Senior Vice President, Ipsos ASI Toronto and presenter at the BCAMA event on October 27th.

As I noted in the original post, I hang with a crowd that uses the term "biometrics" in an entirely different fashion. Actually, this definition is a newer definition of the term:

[T]he term “Biometrics” has ... been used to refer to the emerging field of technology devoted to identification of individuals using biological traits, such as those based on retinal or iris scanning, fingerprints, or face recognition.

In other words, I don't care how you FEEL. I care who you ARE.

Well, I just ran across something in my feeds that appeared on the findBIOMETRICS website. Now findBIOMETRICS usually concentrates on identification, but they recently reprinted this press release from Time Warner. Excerpts:

Biometrics to Monitor Consumer Emotion at new Time Warner Neuromarketing Medialab - 26th January, 2012

Time Warner Inc. today announced the opening of a state of the art Medialab for research and development at its worldwide headquarters in New York City. The Time Warner Medialab has been designed to generate valuable insights into consumer behavior, evolving media habits and industry trends across all of Time Warner's businesses, brands and advertising partners....

The lab incorporates testing for consumer emotion through biometric monitoring devices that measure a participant's physiological responses to content. The center's virtual testing room is configured for eye-tracking studies that test the effectiveness of content and ads on PC/web, television and mobile devices. The lab also houses several large focus group and observation rooms, all equipped with the latest technical and mobile viewing devices.

Time Warner's premier partner in creating the Medialab was Ipsos MediaCT, a client-focused market research company that concentrates on analyzing consumer behavior. Ipsos MediaCT applied its specialization in understanding consumer behavior into the center's technology and research techniques.

As you can see, Time Warner's idea of a "biometric device" is a device that can track eye movements - for example, how the eyes react to an advertisement featuring Carrot Top. (In my case, the eyes would involuntarily close.) Certainly valuable, but again a little different than how I use the term.

Needless to say, I have shared this new press release with the private mailing list that told me about the October press release. Obviously I can't share the reactions that will occur - the mailing list is, after all, private - but I wonder if the participants will exhibit such emotional gestures as the rolling of eyes or deep sighs of discontent. And perhaps findBIOMETRICS will get a "why did you run THAT press release?" letter.

Now I realize that many of you are rolling your eyes at this whole thing, which sounds like a spat among practitioners of useless arts. But, as I noted at the beginning of my original post, this whole debate has wider applicability:

While we sometimes think of language as a static thing, it is in reality constantly changing. This is especially true for languages such as English that are widely used - my language is always incorporating terms from foreign languages, and is always inventing new terms - and new meanings for terms. If you don't believe me, take a time machine back to 2001 and ask Ashton Kutcher to tweet.

When using any type of terminology - ANY type of terminology - it's important to make sure that all parties are using the terms in the same way.

Did I sucker myself back into Foursquare?

In case you don't know the story, let me recap.

I had been active in Foursquare for some time. At the time I didn't have a fancy-dancy smartphone, but I used my regular old phone to check into places on Foursquare, earn mayorships, and dominate the universe as we know it. (Sorta.)

That continued until my January 15, 2011 check-in at the 99 Cents Only Store on Mountain Avenue in Ontario, California. That's about the time that I discovered that since I was not using a smartphone, I was no longer eligible to earn mayorships.

So, later that same day, while at a Rubios in Upland, I made the comment

this may be my last foursquare check-in

And I vented. Oh, I vented.

But at least Gowalla has been consistent; Foursquare literally changed the rules of the game in the middle of the game....

The mobile web was a workaround for those who wanted to cheat, but that workaround has now apparently been closed.

As has the ability for mobile web users to legitimately earn mayorships.

Of course, I could still earn Foursquare mayorships if I wanted to. All that I have to do is buy a high end smartphone with GPS enabled, and also buy the high-end service plan that service providers force smartphone users to buy. Lay out $2000 or more, and I can continue to earn mayorships.

It's not worth it....

So, does anyone want to suggest a location-based service that actually LIKES non-smartphone users?

And I quit using Foursquare, and quit accepting friend requests, and pretty much was not all that keen on Foursquare. (Hell hath no fury like a scorned social locationist.)

And what did Foursquare do? Nothing. Not that I necessarily expect Foursquare to personally contact every single user, but while I'm bombarded with messages from other services ("Hey, we haven't seen you at SuperSocialHangout lately! Where have you been? We miss you!"), I received nary a peep from Foursquare regarding my sudden lack of activity.

So why did I check into an Ontario Starbucks just a few minutes ago?

Easy. Foursquare recognized one of my devices as legitimate - specifically, my netbook.

You see, when I arrived at Starbucks this morning (due to a loyalty program, FYI) and fired up my netbook, I was directed to the Starbucks/Yahoo! partner screen, which had all sorts of added content. Obviously I could check my Starbucks Rewards information, but I noticed that I could also check into Foursquare.

What the hey, I thought.

Then I noticed that Foursquare offered me the option of identifying my location.

Now my netbook doesn't have GPS enabled, but since I'm using the local Starbucks wi-fi, Starbucks - and therefore Foursquare - has a pretty good idea of where I am.

So I checked in for the first time in over a year - and the rewards started flying.

Points for this check-in: 10
This is your first check-in since January '11 +6
Back at Starbucks (12 months) +2
First Coffee Shop in 12 months! +2

So perhaps I don't have to pay thousands of dollars to participate in Foursquare. After all, the netbooks are cheap, the wi-fi is now free, and this may be a win-win for everyone.

We'll see how this progresses.

P.S. Speaking of locations, you'll note that this post doesn't have a location tag on it, despite the fact that Blogger offers such a service. You see, I've had to switch back to the old Blogger interface because my old netbook doesn't have enough memory to run the new Blogger interface. So my non-trendiness continues.

When a bad manager spurred @purplecar to examine GameStop

I have never met Christine Cavalier - I first encountered her in the comments section of a Loren Feldman Google+ thread - but she appears to be an intelligent person. However, like most of us, when presented with a purchasing opportunity, she does not spend countless hours of time analyzing the opportunity before purchase.

But in one case, she analyzed the purchasing opportunity AFTER purchase, and clued me in on something in the process.

On Wednesday, Cavalier and her son went to their local GameStop to buy something with her son's gift card. After selecting a new title, they went to the counter to make the purchase. As Cavalier recounts, the store manager volunteered to get a used version of the game, did so without asking, and practically argued with Cavalier to tell her that she really wanted the used version, and not the new version, because it's so much cheaper.

Cavalier ended up getting the used game, but something stuck in her craw:

On the short drive home, I began to wonder why the manager “helped” me so much. His insistence on the used game bordered on weird. The fact that I left the store feeling bamboozled into buying an inferior product started to anger me.

As lunch was cooking, I remembered my basic capitalism education: there is a reason behind every sell. What could the reason be here? Why sell these used games so strongly? It must be profit margin. That was the only logical choice.

Cavalier consulted an online human-staffed research service - Twitter - and confirmed her suspicions. She then did the math - see her post here. (In case you haven't figured it out, I want you to read her entire post.)

While consulting an online non-staffed research service - Google - I found additional evidence to confirm GameStop's business model. Keith at Boesky.com, while primarily concerned with the impact that GameStop has on original game developers, discussed GameStop's business model himself:

It is time to for Gamestop to fess up and acknowledge their real business. Relative margins reveal Gamestop's actual business to be the collection and resale of used games. New game and accessory sales revenue may equal or exceed the used game revenue, but they do not come close to matching the profit.

Why not? Because, as Keith points out (yeah, I want you to read Keith's post also):

Gamestop profits from multiple sales of the game.

According to Keith, here's what is about to happen to Cavalier (who pays $16 a year to be a GameStop member):

To ensure return of the games, consumers who buy a games are bombarded with offers to turn them back in for credit. Each turned in game builds the used inventory, at no cost to Gamestop.To ensure return of the games, consumers who buy a games are bombarded with offers to turn them back in for credit. Each turned in game builds the used inventory, at no cost to Gamestop.

I don't know how long it will take, but GameStop is going to start encouraging Cavalier to turn her son's game back in - he's tired of it now, isn't he? - and get some credit. That credit can then be used for the purchase of another used game, continuing the cycle.

Cavalier herself noted that the manager was effectively pushing this strategy. When Cavalier was still trying to buy a new game rather than a used one, the manager threw this at her:

“Well, have him try the used game and if he doesn’t like it, you can exchange it and you haven’t bought the new one.”

Unfortunately, the manager's insistence on the used sale resulted in a customer who took to Twitter about her concerns, and who wrote a blog post about her concerns - a blog post that concluded as follows:

My friends tell me Amazon is a decent alternative to GameStop. We are GameStop members (pay $16 bucks a year for discounts, but guess what, only on USED GAMES) but I’m going to pursue the Amazon option. I predict GameStop will go out of business if they don’t insist on selling decent-looking used games for a better value than 80% of the new game price (and that was with my discount!).

Oh, and Cavalier also added this comment:

(Their email and print flyers are so male-oriented that I don’t even read them. I unsubbed today).

You see, Cavalier's son isn't the only gamer in the house. Cavalier's daughter is also a gamer. And, incidentally, it's Cavalier herself who pays for the games, or at a minimum takes the kids to the store to buy them. Not any more.

However, the bigger damage to GameStop may not be the angry customers. It may be the angry game publishers. I already noted that Keith's post primarily concentrates on GameStop's adverse impact on original game developers. As Keith notes, the game developers pay all of the costs for game development, pay GameStop for various promotional tasks, and then enjoy the profits from the sales of one game - a game that, as mentioned before, GameStop sells over and over and over.

So, what can potentially happen when entertainment content developers believe that people are stealing their content? As we've seen from the continuing SOPA/PIPA/ACTA brouhaha, I wouldn't be surprised if the game developers are meeting with Lamar Smith right now and informing him of the terrible dangers of a rogue game market. ("Rogue games could be infected with viruses, and since people are now using game machines to surf the 'Net, this could allow terrorists to cripple the Internet in the U.S.!")

I wonder if the savvy investors are going to start avoiding GME long-term.

Outside the Beltway, the Procurement Edition

I have spent a good deal of time in Proposals, responding to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) from various government agencies. But when you delve into the world of proposals, you'll find that most people who provide proposal advice cannot help me all that much.

Let me provide you with an example. John Lauderdale recently wrote something entitled Ten Things You Did Wrong in Your Last (Losing) Proposal Effort. Now that obviously sounds like a valuable thing to read. But I noticed something when I got to item 1:

1. Your Program Manager-Designate was

a.not known by name or face to the source selection official
b.was not assigned full-time to the proposal effort longer than 30 days before the final solicitation hit the street.

Note the use of the word "source selection official." At least Lauderdale didn't say something about not reading Section L carefully.

You see, John Lauderdale works for a company (Organizational Communications Inc.) based in Reston, Virginia. In fact, if you look at any publication from the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP), you'll find that a lot of the people associated with APMP are located in Virginia, Maryland, or Washington DC.

Why? Because they all concentrate on Federal proposals. These are the proposals in which the RFP has a "Section L" and a "Section M" and in which the person running the procurement is referred to as a "source selection official." As an APMP member, I had access to a wealth of materials that discuss Section L, Section M, source selection officials, and the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

And I'm unable to use most of it.

You see, in my particular case, the vast majority of RFPs to which I respond are issued by state and local governments, or by governments in foreign nations. And all of these agencies (I can potentially deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of them who may buy our products) have their own ways of doing things.

If you don't know what you're doing, even locating RFPs from state and local governments can be difficult, as Steif Marco notes:

State and local government bids and RFPs are notoriously difficult to locate. Unlike the federal government, which conducts most purchasing through GSA schedules or FedBizOpps.gov, state and local bids are located in a great number of sources throughout the internet -- on government webpages, public works pages, 3rd party contracted websites, and newspaper classifieds.

And all of these agencies format their RFPs differently. Anyone who has only worked Federal proposals and ends up reading a county government RFP is in for a bit of a surprise. You can't assume that particular RFP content is in a particular location of the RFP; you need to read the table of contents to find the location (or possibly locations) that contain your legal terms, your payment terms, your proposal formatting requirements, or what have you.

Now to be fair, the APMP does pay some attention to the needs of people who don't work on Federal proposals. And some lessons from the Federal world may be applied to other proposals. But at the same time, there are a lot of cases where the stuff plain doesn't apply. One time I attended a huge conference closing session in which someone talked about changes to Department of Defense procurement procedures. That's all right and fine...except I don't think that the Calgary Police Service is going to base its procurement policies on what the U.S. Department of Defense is doing.

Now most of the people who will read this post probably don't work in proposals, and may not have realized that there are proposals, and there are proposals - or that things can get really specialized. But that's probably true for any job - my head would probably be spinning if I had to worry about all of the minute little things that you have to worry about in YOUR job. Maybe it's an issue regarding which cable to use with which video camera. Maybe it's something about coffeepot maintenance. Or whatever.

And I bet you that the people inside the Beltway can't help you do your job either.

(empo-tymshft) Why Bad Predictions Happen (the "five computers" prediction)

Mark J. Fletcher wrote a recent blog post on bad technology positions. While the bulk of his post dealt with a bad prediction about E 911, he started off with a classic bad prediction from Thomas Watson the elder.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Now some people like to look at bad predictions and laugh at how stupid the predicter was. In my case, I'd rather put myself back in the shoes of the person who made the bad prediction, and try to understand what motivated the person to think as he or she did.

I've even done this to myself, including the time in 2009 that I was forced to retract my prediction that Oracle and Sun would not collaborate until 2010 or 2011, or after final approval of the Oracle-Sun merger.

But let's look at the environment in which Thomas Watson made his oft-repeated prediction...if he made it. There's no evidence that Thomas Watson the elder actually said such a thing; perhaps the statement, or a similar statement, was made by Douglas Hartree or Howard Aiken or Thomas Watson Jr., and the statement might have been made not in 1943, but in 1951 or 1952 or 1953.

So let's assume that SOMEONE made a statement, perhaps in the early 1950s, claiming that a few computers could take care of the world's computing needs. How could someone have such a misguided conception?

Well, actually it was pretty easy. Remember that at the time, computers were big hunks of metal that were pretty much huge calculating machines. (Actually, the computers of today are also huge calculating machines; it's just that today's computers calculate Farmville crop yields instead of missile path projections.) These huge calculating machines were expensive, hard to maintain (all the bugs, you know), and required great effort to input data and receive the data output.

If this is the way in which a person of 1953 thought of the computer, then it would be extremely difficult to conceive of something radically different.

In that year of 1953, a young boy named Albert Gore, Jr. was five years old. Now even though Gore's father was a powerful man - he had just been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952 - it's ludicrous to imagine Senator Gore getting a computer for his young son. Where would the Gore family put their computer? Where would they get someone to build the raised floor and the cooling system? How long would it take the kid to figure out how to input stuff into the computer? Where would the family find a machine-language coder to create programs for kid to run on the computer?

And, come to think of it, why would you want to create programs for a kid? Computers were good for doing complex military calculations, and for undertaking tasks such as compiling census data for the United States. Only an idiot would take the time to program a computer to play solitaire or something like that.

It wasn't until 1954 that computers were really seen outside of government circles. In December 1954, John Hancock (the life insurance people) got their hands on a state-of-the-art IBM 650 computer. Early IBM 650 computers were extremely powerful, and had memory capacities of 2,000 words (or 10,000 characters) - not enough for anyone to manage a simulated farm. And even if it had much more memory, the 22-33 operations per second speed meant that you couldn't do all that much.

Yet even the (by modern eyes) meager capabilities of the IBM 650 resulted in a revolution in computing that couldn't have been predicted back in 1953. By 1962, IBM 650 computers were flying off the shelves, and an amazing 2,000 computers had been sold.

And all of that happened before computers became more powerful, and much smaller, and much easier to use. By the time I used my first computer in the 1970s - a machine with a single-line display that was dedicated to running BASIC programs - computers were able to do all sorts of things that people in the early 1950s just could never envision.

And it just went on from there.

How could a person in 1953 have predicted that within 50 years, hundreds of millions of people would own "computers" that didn't require special cooling, a special room, or punched card entry. Could a person of 1953 have imagined a strange cross between a typewriter and a television - a COLOR television - with a display that looked like a piece of paper? And could the person in 1953 imagine that a computer user of 2003 would effortlessly combine text with pictures, send the result to another computer thousands of miles away, and enable a different person in a different location to see that text-picture combination within seconds?

In fact, the person of 1953 would probably say, "That's not a computer!" It's a...it's a...well, what is it?

Perhaps these little tiny things aren't computers, but computer terminals that tie into computers elsewhere which are the REAL computers. And as the pendulum swings toward cloud computing, John Battelle revisited the early prediction:

The march to cloud computing and the rush of companies building brands and services where both enterprises and consumers can park their compute needs is palpable. And over the next ten or so years, I wonder if perhaps the market won’t shake out in such a way that we have just a handful of “computers” – brands we trust to manage our personal and our work storage, processing, and creation tasks. We may access these brands through any number of interfaces, but the computation, in the manner Watson would have understood it, happens on massively parallel grids which are managed, competitively, by just a few companies.

Instead of having just a few computers at selected government agencies, we might just have computers at Facebook, Google, and a few other places. Battelle doesn't believe that Facebook will make the cut; he thinks that the five companies might be

...Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and...IBM.

But if he's wrong, I'm certainly not going to slam him for his inaccurate prediction.

What is the proper perspective?

Floyd Teter is an expert in Oracle applications software.

When Teter wants to read about Oracle products, he wants to read about Oracle products. But recently, when he was checking his feeds, he ran into different stuff:

The top hits are all about the lawsuit with Google, the lawsuit with Montclair State University, and the latest plays on Oracle stock. No question the suits have taken over the headlines.

Teter was not happy, and his post on this ("We've Lost Our Perspective") concluded with a CAPS-LOCK LADEN RANT, asking for a return to perspective.

Joe Paterno's death last weekend also resulted in a consideration of perspective. To some, the proper perspective on Joe Paterno was to concentrate on his entire illustrious career. To others, the proper perspective on Joe Paterno was to concentrate on his lack of effective action one day in 2002, a lack of action which allegedly resulted in several boys being molested over the following years.

I'm sure that all of us can think of a number of people, companies, or events that can be looked at from different perspectives. Just to take one admittedly fascinating example, Richard Nixon could be considered as the President who launched the most significant thaw of the Cold War era, or he could be considered as the President who continued a brutal war in Southeast Asia. Or the President who ended the brutal war in Southeast Asia. Or the President who sold out our allies in Southeast Asia. And I haven't even gotten to Nixon's domestic policies.

To be truthful about it, we adopt the perspective that best suits our worldview. If our lives are dominated by fighting the evil of child molestation, that's going to shape our view of Joe Paterno. If we're a Google fanboi, that's going to shape our view of Oracle.

In effect, the best way to approach this is to acknowledge our perspective, and (in most cases) explain why we have the perspective that we have.

Your thoughts?