» Miscellaneous

1. OCNN (Ochocinco News Network)

Everyone knows the story of Chad Johnson, the wide receiver for the Bengals, who legally changed his name to Ochocinco. He thought that it meant 85 in Spanish, although in Spanish 85 is actually “ochenta y cinco.”

Well Chad Ochocinco is very involved in Twitter. He has announced a partnership with Motorola to start the OCNN. I’m terrified of the kind of news he’ll be breaking.

2. Miley Cyrus Leaves Twitter

I am placing this on the list, not because it is sad but because it’s sad that anyone even cares. I’ve seen too many stories about this and it happened more than two weeks ago.

I’d like to put her Twitter rap from YouTube as number 3 but I think I’ve used enough space for Miley Cyrus already.

3. Head of State Assassination Pages on Facebook

Both President Barack Obama and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have been targets of assassination hyperbole.

In September a poll on Facebook asked “Should Obama be killed?” Recently several “Kill Berlusconi” Facebook groups have appeared. All of the pages are being investigated.

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Tuvalu

Have you ever heard of the island of Tuvalu? Without a doubt you have heard of it’s web extension, tv. Most web users closely associate the .tv domain with the entertainment industry, which is becoming increasingly popular in it’s usage.

However, there is something most of us don’t think about when we visit these websites, the Country of Tuvalu, which may be taking it’s last breath before receding into the Pacific Ocean because of the effects of global warming. Today it was reported that Tuvalu has been evacuated because of underwater earthquakes in the region and fears of tsunamis.

Tuvalu is the fourth smallest country in the world and has the second lowest elevation of any country, 15 feet above sea level. These two combine to make a volatile mix.

Currently Tuvalu leases the .tv domain. They make $1 million quarterly. So what happens to an a web extension when a country collapses? The extension in all likelihood will probably be converted into representing ‘television’ which it pretty much already is. This was confirmed by GoDaddy.

I figured this to be pretty interesting since I never would have guessed what .tv was or what country it represented. The good news is the money Tuvalu is receiving for the extension makes that their number one export, better known as their only export. The bad news it is was timed with its own demise.

I was introduced to the Kano model theory and found it to be fascinating so I thought I would share a quick overview on the theory.

As Wikpedia states:

The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 80’s by Professor Noriaki Kano which classifies customer preferences into five categories:

* Attractive
* One-Dimensional
* Must-Be
* Indifferent
* Reverse

Visualized here very well:

So what does this mean in short, it sums up innovation, product development and all of the above.  I heard Paul Annett speak on the topic a couple of weeks ago and he used these two examples:

1.) Your at a hotel and you go to the bathroom and there is no toilet paper, that’s going to upset you but if you go to the bathroom and it’s there, it would not satisfy you since it’s a basic need that was fulfilled.

2.) Let’s take for instance, the camera phone, when it first came out, it was cool and hip, now it’s considered a normal thing to have with a phone.  The level of excitement has gone away because time has taken over and camera phones are no longer exciting.

So in short what does this mean, new innovation becomes a basic need with time.  What’s cool and hip today, will become a norm tomorrow.  So keep innovating or hire an agency like us to do it for you.

While I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, I had limited access to newspapers and really news in general. One of the most solid sources of news for volunteers was from old copies of The Economist passed around from volunteer to volunteer. I would often read stories months after they occurred.

Since my return last year, I rarely read The Economist but now and then I come across a copy or see something online and I get a little nostalgic. Now I’m surrounded by information. I am on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and many other sites. With 24-hour news channels, I’m never more than 2 minutes behind the latest news event. So times have changed for me in the past year alone. But where will we be in 50 years? Or even better 5 years? Facebook, MySpace and Twitter didn’t even exist 6 years ago. What will happen in the next 6?

I came across the Did You Know? video created by XPlane in a partnership with The Economist. The video is a visualization of social media and marketing statistics. It does an amazing job of summing up all of the statistics that we try to pass along to our clients, plus a few that we didn’t even know.

Like, did you know that there are 2,000,000 televisions in U.S. bathrooms? Or more importantly did you know about the $3 million that Dell claims to have made from Twitter posts since 2007? The big number for our DC friends is of course the $55 million President Barack Obama raised with the help of social networks.

Redbeacon was this years TechCrunch 50 winner. I wasn’t that impressed with the judges selection. I thought that the presentation was fantastic as they created a mock scenario where they ordered 500 cupcakes which were delivered to the audience in a matter of minutes. Sure, this sounds like a fantastic idea, but let’s face it, it’s a bit far fetched. They’re launching this October in the bay area and then hopefully expanding to other cities in the near future. You can see their presentation here:

My good friend, Cyrus Massoumi, launched ZocDoc at the orginal TechCrunch 50 and his idea which is currently in operations in New York city is a great company because he focused on one specific industry: doctors and dentists. He’s not trying to basically achieve the “get whatever whenever” philosophy which is actually W Hotels motto by the way.

My favorite company that presented this year was Crowd Flower. They created a Software as a Service that allows you to provide quality assurance with Mechanical Turks. You can watch the presentation here:

For those of you have worked with Mechanical Turks, you would know that they fill a gap in areas where machine computing can’t play a role but present some very obvious issues. Your paying people to complete micro-tasks known as “Hits” for pennies and controlling the quality of this tasks can be very challenging. Crowd Flower did a great job at providing a solution for this and I personally would have liked to have seem them win.

You can see all of the companies from TechCrunch 50 here.

Paul Annett, the Design lead at Clearleft, presented at Refresh D.C. last night. His public speaking engagements this year include: SXSW (Austin, USA), Webdagene (Oslo, Norway), FOWD (Leeds, UK), Refresh DC (Washington DC, USA), eBay (London, UK).

Here are some video clips I took of the presentation. He explained how his Youtube video which appears number #1 on Google when you search for magic trick has received over 13 million visitors.

He also went on to speak about a bunch of different interests and views regarding web design and usability. Thanks to Refresh D.C. and it’s sponsors for hosting such a great event!