Living All In

Currently for auction on eBay, every officially licensed Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game ever sold, 670 to be exact, plus a NES console, Power Glove, and other accessories.  How much for this one stop collection you ask?  Well, with six days to go, the leading bid is $8,885 $12,300 US. 

I’m just finishing a video game themed book for teen guys plus Hayley and I bought a Nintendo Wii for our anniversary earlier this month (it’s a blast!)  So this hits home and makes me nostalgic in more ways than one.

Check out the games and gear:

Not that this is a tech blog (tho I am a techie), but all this talk on brands, logos, marks, and tag lines comes front and center Monday when Cingular and its orange Jack splat is scuttled and the company is renamed AT&T.  The FCC rubber stamped the company’s merger late Friday and AT&T’s press room has posted the release here.

Yuck.

Is there more of a starched shirt, corporate tower mark than AT&T?  Besides IBM and Xerox of course…  Highly recognizable brands, sure.  But for what mobile phones and services have become (personal lifestyle extensions,) scuttling a highly effective brand and marketing campaign (Cingular) for a mark that screams rotary dial is mind boggling to me.  This is a case where AT&T should be a secondary heritage mark (see my Thomas Nelson logo post) utilized for business services and data network initiatives. 

If AT&T did an ad morphing Alexander Graham Bell’s first ‘can you hear me now?’ (take that Verizon!) to telegraph wires to huge fiber optic pipes underneath oceans touting innovation and a long history of doing business at the speed sound, wouldn’t you believe they had a bigger network than the geek guy and his posse from Verizon?  A bigger data network than Sprint?  Sure.  But AT&T and the iPhone?  Sounds like the chess club captain accompanying the prom queen to the ball.

I know, I know, AT&T is one of the most recognizable brands in North America and highly iconic world wide.  But American Telephone and Telegraph, no matter how you shrink it down, has a corporate first, little guy second, oppressive, and even ancient feel to it.  And ancient and corporate is the very opposite of what the wireless consumer wants to feel.  As far as BellSouth and SBC are concerned (home landline and business telecom services), the AT&T rebranding will probably be an upgrade.  But for the eclectic world of mobile subscribers, where freedom and expression are the goods of the day and the ‘every man’ is the consumer, we have to apply the soon-to-be-patented Hungry Planet branding test:

Take two brands and insert them into a futuristic movie about an organization that grows to govern the world.  Which would you choose to have a more optimistic view and less oppressive rule of the world?

AT&T or Cingular?

As my examples of Coke and Nike in the post The Perfect Mark Myth illustrate, AT&T is throwing away a mark that has great value in the personal mobile business.   All of this in favor of ’simplifying’ while ignoring the cultural climate that surrounds one of their largest markets of future growth (mobile) not to mention merely three days after the most anticipated mobile device ever is debuted as being a Cingular exclusive.

As a Cingular customer, say it ain’t so Jack.  On Monday, you’ll have succeeded in "lowering the bar" of branding to simply choosing the most famous mark instead of using your stable of marks to reach an increasingly personalized culture. 

In one of the most ill-conceived products of the year (just under the wire,) The American Bible Society and ChristianMobile have announced a partnership to offer God’s Word to anyone with a Java-capable mobile phone.

It just takes three months to download.

And costs $9.99 a month for three months.

By signing up for this service and by entering your personal PIN Code on the Christian Mobile website, or replying "Yes" to the message sent to the cell phone, you acknowledge that you are subscribing to our monthly Virtual Bible service charged at $9.99 monthly. Customers will be charged $9.99 every four weeks till the end of third month of service, after which the service will terminate. At the end of the service, you should have received all five books of the Virtual Bible service.

"All five books"?  So you just get the Pentateuch?!

The versions offered are either tended by the ABS or are public domain (for $30.)  They’re offering the Contemporary English Version (CEV), the Good News Translation (GNT), and the King James Version (KJV) in English.  Also, the Reina Valera in Spanish.

Seriously, thirty bucks?  Three months?  Are we using 2400 baud modems? 

I doubt the ABS is out any money on this venture and are probably just collecting waiting to collect licensing royalties on the deal.  Just because you can do something technologically, doesn’t mean it’s a good business model.  I just can’t see anyone but the geeked out paying thirty bucks for one of these translations on their phone, and then waiting three months to receive it (you receive three text messages that start the download.)

Gee, why not check out Olive Tree Software and download their Bible Reader smartphone program for free, then go to the list of over 75 free Bibles and texts you can download to your device (including the Reina Valera.)  Of course you can also purchase more modern Bible translations and copyrighted texts, but this includes the NIV, NLT, and ESV, so you can choose from your favorite translation though not all books work on all devices.  Palm and Pocket PCs tend to be the standards.

By the way, the KJV costs $5.00, works on almost any Smartphone and you can have it in three minutes instead of three months.

Laridian also offers a product called PocketBible for a shorter list of devices and charges $10 for the reader.  But they do have a few free texts after that.  For PocketPC only, you might try Pocket e-Sword.  Totally free except licensed texts.

Once again, just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.  If you think I’m missing something, comment me.