Living All In

OK, I’ve decided to dust off my Pownce account (and my blogging habits) and see how sticky this app really is. So November is Pownce month, and hopefully with the announcement of a public API (cool WordPress widget anyone?) I’ll get to using it more.

Watch here for invites to the still private beta.

If you use Windows XP or Vista (you early adopter you,) you’ve got to check out Notescraps, developed by my friend and old boss Bob Pritchett.  It’s a little program that does the best job out there of creating and maintaining sticky notes.  I’ve used notes in Outlook as well as the sticky feature in OS X for the Mac.  Notescraps is by far the cleanest, simplest, and most intuitive out there.

See a video demo here and give it a download for your Win PC. Free trial, $20 bucks if you like it.

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:

From The Times (UK):

Here’s the typical eBook/Google intro…

GOOGLE and some of the world’s top publishers are working on plans that they hope could do for books what Apple’s iPod has done for music.

The internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry.

With 380m people using Google each month, the move would give a significant boost to the development of e-books and have a big impact on the publishing industry and book retailers.

Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, said: “We are working on a platform that will let publishers give readers full access to a book online.”

And here’s the non-standard, new stuff from Google’s eUro eBook cHief:

He did not believe taking books online would mean the end of the printed word but it would give readers more options when it came to buying. “You may just want to rent a travel guide for the holiday or buy a chapter of a book. Ultimately, it will be the readers who decide how books are read,” he said.

He added that after many years of setbacks the electronic book looked poised to go main-stream. Commuters in Japan were already reading entire novels on their mobile phones.

See, at least Jens has a realistic view that eBooks add options but don’t come close to replacing books from trees.  I can envision some people renting a travel guide for a holiday, I just can’t see most people doing so.  Same with buying a chapter of a book for reading.  As much as people tout their multi-tasking skills, I doubt many people will toggle from paper/digital/paper when reading chapters 1, 2, & 3 of the next Ted Dekker novel just because the person’s traveling for the weekend.

In a previous post about Microsoft and eBooks, I mentioned the scanner that Google and Logos Bible Software uses.  It’s very cool.  Check out a demo here.

As for the Japanese reading novels on their cellphones, Japan is a literal graveyard littered with failed ‘cutting edge’ devices and digital lifestyle changes never adopted by the West.  Somebody tell Google it’s a cultural thing.  Scanning for reference is one thing, but the future is not now.  It very well may be coming, but eBooks are still the fodder of breathless reporters and eInk manufacturers.

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.