From the monthly archives:
The telecom industry in general, and the cell phone industry in particular, are commonplace for price haggling. Everyone knows that just mentioning the thought of switching cell phone providers spurs the next offering, even without the customer asking for a better deal. But when it comes to shopping at large department stores, I would never [...]
Back in the halcyon days of late 2009 (has it really been more than three weeks since my Twitter was completely choked by decade retrospectives and best-ofs?), AdWeekMedia identified Apple’s “Get a Mac” ad campaign as the best of the decade. And with good reason. Here’s Barbara Lippert’s explanation for why this campaign worked: Apple [...]
A few months ago The New York Times published an article examining the real-life effects of widespread DVR use in America’s TV watching habits. There’s plenty of interesting material there (including an explanation for why DVR use has been helping certain shows), but I was most fascinated by the shockingly high percentage of people who [...]
Yesterday, Apple announced that they updated the smartphone’s SDK to enable VoIP over the 3G network. This news may have been overshadowed by the simultaneous release of the Apple iPad, but yesterday’s VoIP update should not go unnoticed, especially given its buildup over the past half a year of debate. PhoneArena.com correctly commented, “While January [...]
Just two weeks after the Publishers Information Bureau reported, in its 2009 year-end magazine advertising report, some sobering industry figures–that ad pages dropped more than 25%, that revenues dropped more than 18%, and that only 18 consumer magazines saw ad-page gains–comes news that GQ magazine’s January issue iPhone App has sold more than 12,000 times. GQ [...]
Google’s new release, announced yesterday, enables advertisers through Google’s TV ads for television campaigns to use Google’s toll free numbers to track phone leads back to the TV campaign. This new release captures the same appeal as Ifbyphone’s Call Tracking video in yesterday’s post. The lesson for advertisers is simple – if you are investing [...]
Amidst this past summer’s brawl over whether Apple would accept the Google Voice app, Google promised that it would bring Google Voice to the iphone “one way or the other,” in the words of Vic Gundotra, the vice president of engineering for mobile apps at Google. Today, Google delivered their promise with Google Voice’s release as [...]
Ifbyphone, a leading provider of cloud telephony, recently created the following video, and mentioned it in their blog. The cartoon animation’s depiction of call tracking is about as simple to watch as a TV cartoon. Sometimes its the witty but short cartoons that really connect readers to a message. The message here is about the [...]
We’ve already mentioned on this here blog the importance of Google’s efforts to sort through and make sense of the vast resources of information available on the internet. Sven Larsen, writing for From Bogota With Love, asks a strikingly compelling question: Can there be a Google for Twitter and Facebook? Here’s Larsen: A passage from [...]
The world of professional tennis is incredibly cutthroat. There just aren’t that many professions out there in which an individual who is one of the best 100 people in the whole world at a certain activity can struggle to make a living. (For a nice look at what professional tennis is like for the non-Federers [...]
Yesterday morning I looked at the weather channel in dismay when I saw the image of rainy clouds throughout the day. But when I glanced below at the numbers, which predicted a 30% chance of precipitation, I breathed a sigh of relief. An hour later I arrived at my destination, stepped outside my car, and [...]
