simondelliott

Your not worth talking to if you dont have an iPhone

How high up in a company do you have to be to be able to sign off an iPhone?
At this moment moment its somewhere around the VP level.

The mad thing is this … iPhones are so great that everyone wants them but they are so expensive that most people cannot afford them. The cost is even harder to justify if your company picks up your telephony bill.

From a sales perspective this is great !
I can identify who the decision makers are by what phone they have.

(this post was not made on an iPhone … unfortunately)

Here is the new sam the architect

Visio tip: how to make your diagram look good in word

Tip for making visio look great when placed in a word doc

• save visio diagram as a png set the resolution to printer (300dpi)
• use photoshop to crop the image down to just the picture, you can also compress it here if its too big
• go to word and insert the image into the document

if you really want your diagram to look great, and you have a little more time … then do it in CS3

Innovation competition – win your prize!

Just print out and complete this form to win your prize

The webby awards are in and … Britian beat the rest of europe !

Whooooooo! I know that we are technically joined but its sometimes good to have a little inter European rivalry, and Im sure that our main and buddies wont mind. For those of you who dont know the webbies are the Oscars of the future without the smug acceptance speeches, or fits of crocodile tears.

Any hooo Ive just checked out the winners of the 2009 webbies http://www.webbyawards.com and in almost every category one or two British companies have been nominated. Ov course this is dominated by the wonderful BBC and the guardian, both of which are excellent, but a few smaller UK companies have crept in.

Some of the really great winners who deserve recommendation are lister here

• http://www.keithtyson.com A magical experience in trendy black
• http://animoto.com awsome fun … quite a good laugh and .. a cool idea from the amazon cloud
• http://kids.tate.org.uk/ This is just great, a good place to play around with with your kids on a rainy day

Ov course I have to say bad luck to Dave for missing out on a award with spelling Bee … I was routing for you man !

A rainy day for cloud puns

You IT and Computer professionals out there better watch out, your land is about to be invaded … by the amazonians.

On Tuesday I went to the Amazon Web Services startup event in the wonderful British Museum, for a five hour cloud computing pun festival. Here are some of the shocking attempts at humor that I recorded, more out of a perverse curiosity rather than recording the humor for posterity
Where do you go after the Planet … the Cloud
The Sky is the limit
You’ve got Clouded vision
Flying through the Clouds

The event was excellent, well run, great content and good bunch to network with. And because there was no alcohol I didn’t make a complete chump of myself. What I think Amazon have done that truly amazes me is how they have hooked up everything you need to make a media product with the existing amazon market place and sales tools needed to derive a revenue from it. Whats more they have codified all the processed necessary to make it happen.

There was an interesting audience make up of around 1000 in total, I counted down my row and worked out these percentages.

• 20% Suits
• 20% Business casual
• 10% Casual
• 2% Female
• 3% Bald
• 5% Flamboyant media types

Whenever I try and make, or launch something I dread the endless conversations with the operational team (Luddites more resistive to change than a glacier) to persuade them to commission a new box or worse still … change an old one. Well amazon have really thought about this, and have provided both a web UI and an API to do it. This means that I can get development code into production faster, and If I can do that … it means that I can either demonstrate that an innovation fails or derive revenue from it with a smaller expense (my precious time).

I do have a concern that this inevitable migration to large cloud providers will ultimately create an even larger dependency on a shrinking set of suppliers. In the end this is anti consumer, maybe its time for a state run or even UN owned cloud?

Note:
For those of you who are into sustainability, when someone asked the question “Will Amazon be using renewable energy sources for its servers” there was a big laugh and a stumped speaker.

The Media industry is sick!

After just having got over a massive out break of boyles it seems that the swines in the media industry have gone and caught the flue.

New post on what a headend is

On the old blog I did a A brief explanation of a headend and why its so important It still seems to be a popular article (mainly because of the excellent comments). So Ive made it into a fully blown page … with a picture Whooo Hoooo!

How to make a cultural change happen to a large audience

Sometimes you need a large number of people to behave in a new way. This is called a cultural change. Just about the best example I can give of this is the recent campaigns to stop people smoking. The overall thing that the anti smoking lobby wanted to achieve was to make a culture where smoking was socially unacceptable.

Looking at this from a media and marketing point of view you can apply basic tools to the “non smoking” product. Let me introduce you to the adoption life cycle.

1. unawareness of the product
2. awareness of the product
3. belif in the product or solution
4. attitude to view product favourably
5. intension to commit to product
6. commitment to product

If you want people to do something new, then you have to help move them along the 6 point adoption cycle

What marketers do is segment their target demographic into these groups, Specific tactics can be employed to address each group. Target the bottle necks if most people dont know about the product then educate them (1 to 2), for those that know about it instill a belief in the products effect (2-3), and so on.

This method was used to make drink driving socially unacceptable, to increase sales of ipods and to rebrand the conservative party

The crazy thing about marketing the “non smoking” product is that exactly the same tactics were used to market somking to us in the first place.

Electronic paper, comments

Thanks for all your comments, Ill summarize them here for you
Good spotting … your right she does only have three fingers! Ive also had lots of mails saying “Ive got one of these”. In fact I do have one of these too.
If you are a serious book reader than you will probably also be a dab hand at putting up shelves. Ive had one of these since Christmas and the first thing I noticed was that the piles of books disappeared ! assuming that the power I use is green … epaper is future