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Vol. 7, No. 9
3-1-07
1 Viral Marketing Part 2
2 “Dad, what’s Cialis?”
3 More Firefox woes, MySpace stalking, Dell and Linux, iTV on hold
4 Save your favorite YouTube videos
5 USB boot drive
After the success of product placement in films like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “Tomorrow Never Dies”, television producers wasted no time jumping on the lucrative bandwagon.
At first it was slow and subtle, with a generic soft drink can being replaced buy a Coke product or every featured vehicle being from the same manufacturer but the real onslaught began with game shows, most notably “The Price is Right”. This venerable show had always featured branded products as props rather than just prizes, even before “E.T.”, but suddenly more companies wanted in.
“The King of Queens” visits Lowe’s on a regular basis, Simon on “American Idol” is never far from his Coke, “Survivor” rewards challenge winners with Snickers and Doritos and the football players on “Friday Night Lights” hangs out at Applebee’s.
Advertisers increasingly push their products as content in mainstream shows instead of as sponsors due to the advent of DVR (Digital Video Recorders, sometimes called PVRs for Personal Video Recorders) devices such as TiVos. These gadgets let viewers pause live telecasts and fast-forward through commercials, or prevent commercials from being shown at all in recordings of shows for viewing later. Time-shifting shows for later viewing in a video tape still displayed product ads even in fast-forward but digital recording technologies can jump 30 seconds or 2 minutes of a recording instantly and you’ll never see the product ads that pay for production of those shows.
A natural progression from integrated TV ads are video game ads. After all video game consoles are usually connected to televisions, right?
Free online games are often ad sponsored, with banners scrolling across the top or bottom of the screen during game play, but game producers realized they could incorporate ads directly into games and make more profit, even in commercial games costing upwards of $50.
While a character in “Final Fantasy” chugging down a Pepsi would obviously cause a stir, companies realized that games like “Grand Theft Auto” and “Need for Speed” were ready made for real-world ads with the opportunities for billboards and storefronts all over the screen. Who can blame them for taking advantage?
And according to some, to come full circle to the local ad placements like Burma Shave we end up with a stealth advertising campaign for an upcoming “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” movie.
In early January the “ads”, which consisted of magnetic panels holding “Lite-Brite” type devices, featured crude cartoon characters from the popular Cartoon Channel series and were placed in ten major cities including New York, LA, Chicago, Atlanta and, unfortunately, Boston.
Almost three weeks after the tiny electronic billboards were in place someone not “in the know” called the Boston Police, who promptly called in the bomb squad, the FBI, Homeland Security and the Coast Guard. Fearing the LED billboards were bombs they closed bridges, waterways, subways and Interstates.
I would say this little episode might put a damper on some forms of viral marketing if not for the fact that the Boston bomb squad blew up a traffic-monitoring device placed in the financial district by the city yesterday.
Note to Burma Shave: Put up more signs, everywhere but Boston…
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Although Mozilla Corp. patched
one more Firefox bug last week than
first reported, the researcher whose work has plagued the open-source
browser for weeks has released details about another flaw:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011939&intsrc=hm_list
Two New York men who developed code that tracked visitors to the
online social site MySpace have cut a deal with prosecutors to keep
themselves out of prison:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37871
Dell is warming up to the idea of reintroducing Linux desktops and
notebooks, but for now the computer maker plans to remain on the
sidelines and wait until there's a clear winner among the various
distributions of the open source operating system:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197009142
According to a report from AP, Apple delayed the launch of its latest
multimedia gadget, Apple TV, until mid-March:
http://www.playfuls.com/news_06359_Apple_TV_Postponed_Until_Mid_March.html
Copy us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
http://mattstodayinhistory.podshow.com
Download of the Week
It seems like everyday we encounter another
YouTube video. Mostly they're a waste of
time, but occasionally we find something we want to keep and/or share.
If you see a YouTube video, and want to save
-- and later play it from your hard drive -- TubeMe is the tool for you. Just
insert one or more links to YouTube videos into TubeMe and the program saves
the files to your hard drive. It's free
here:
http://ashimonovits.brinkster.net/TubeMe.html
Art Maley
Email Question of the Week
Q: With the size of flash and/or portable USB
drives getting larger
(large enough to handle an operting system with some external HD's),
why are we still unable to "boot up" a computer with an external HD
without a fixed HD attached to the motherboard? Is someone designing
such a system? Seems like it would increase a person's mobility so
that they would not have to lug around a laptop.
A: You can boot most computers today from an
external hard drive as long
as the BIOS supports it. I have been able to boot my Mac from an
external firewire hard drive ever since OSX came out 5 years ago.
Many people used/still use the original Firewire iPods as a handy
bootable hard drive, especially if you are in the Tech support business.
Windows computers can be booted from USB or Firewire Hard drives.
However, Microsoft's official position is that the external USB-based
mass storage devices "cannot be the primary hard disk storage
solution on a regular system", just to be used in an emergency. It's
all about licensing, as Windows OS is licensed to the computer not to
YOU. Talk to Steve Ballmer if you have a problem with that. :-)
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usbfaq.mspx
You can boot many Linux variants from something as small as a flash
drive today.
So yes, the systems that exist today are very capable of doing this.
Desktop computers will soon be a dying breed. What you envision of
carrying around a small "box" that is essentially your
"computer"
that you can dock to a Monitor/Mouse Keyboard at work, home, while
traveling etc. is the future and will very soon be here. The
technology is not the issue. It just takes time to get commercialized.
Hash
hash@ucanweb.com
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