Chris Leong

Disoriented views from the rosy lens of an optimistic realist.

Month: February, 2009

The Changing Faces of Marketing

There is this interesting video that I found about how the “conversation” between the Advertiser and Consumer has changed.

In the short film, Bring the love back, a smooth-talking male lead found that grandiose statements and superficial understanding were no longer enough to win the heart of his “consumer”. The movie was a word-of-mouth success, generating over 120,000 views and attracting links from over 370 sites.

This video highlights the increasingly growing gap between the marketers and consumers. It highlights the flaws of traditional marketing that relies on TV & Radio advertisements, outdoor adverts and printed adverts. Every brand will be preaching on messages like

  • Buy me, I will make you look thinner, prettier, younger and sexier
  • Buy me, You will look cool and girls will flock around you like birds

The common message is Buy, Buy, Buy. And if you have million of messages saying the same thing. Here is the amount of advertisement that an average American is exposed to

From the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV microjolts of commercial pollution flood into your brain at the rate of around 3,000 marketing messages per day. Every day an estimated twelve billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials and more than 200,000 television commercials are dumped into North America’s collective unconscious”. (Wikipedia)

No wonder consumer are trained to ignore these messages and crave for a new type of dialogue. These days, progressive companies are focusing on life time revenue per customer rather than focusing on one-off purchases.

To do this, companies needs to be “friends” of their customers rather than just any other salesman.

Updates for Windows 7 Client Beta

Win7

Windows 7 Beta users. Just found out there are some updates that you need to install manually. Install this update to resolve issues with non-compatible applications for Windows 7 Beta.

Get it here Update for Windows 7 Client Beta (KB967062)

Visual Studio Flex Add On (Amethyst)

Received an email from Huw Collingbourne highlighting to me the availability of another Visual Studio Flex Add On.

For more information about this. Checkout the following sites:

In my previous post I’ve also blog about another add on

Check out the screenshots for the Amethyst add on

Flex Add On

Flex Add On

Harvard Reference Generator for Free

I found this useful tool to assist me in generating references for my assignments. This really makes my life easier and I thought it would be beneficial to share this out. In this tool, you can reference your source by:

  • Referencing a Book
  • Referencing a Chapter of a Book
  • Referencing a Journal Article
  • Referencing a Website
  • Referencing an e-mail

 

Check out Harvard Reference Generator.

 

Another great tool to try out will be Great Summary, a tool that helps you summarize web articles in a jiffy.

Twitter with Blu Powered by WPF

Just fell in love with this Twitter tool (blu) that is powered by Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF). It leverages on the goodness that WPF brings like great graphics, cool animations and a kick ass user interfaces. Check it out blu.

blu twitter tool

It offers many cool features but there is one feature that really makes my life easier in twittering. TinyUrl Integration, this feature is a real time saver. I just need to paste my link to blu and it will convert the link to a TinyUrl. 🙂

Here’s some info about blu’s features from their site

Unlimited tweets
With blu you can view unlimited tweets. Just keep scrolling and more tweets will be loaded and displayed automatically.

See the full conversation
Here’s another great feature in blu. You get a tweet, but it’s a reply to something you said earlier and you can’t quite remember what it was you said.

Usually, there isn’t a good way to see the first part of your conversation, but with blu, simply click on the arrow before the username and voila! Your tweet will flip in-place revealing the first part of your conversation.

Tiny url integration
That’s right. We’ve added tiny url support. Simply type or paste a link into the update bubble and blu will convert it for you. No extra buttons, no extra box.

Want to expand your link? Just click the ‘plus’ icon and blu will roll-back to the full url.

 blu intergates with tinyurl

Choose your favorites
We know you follow a lot of people, but perhaps you follow some individuals a little more enthusiastically than others. blu hears you!

Once you’ve defined your favorite tweeters with ‘Faves’, you’ll be notified whenever your favorite people tweet.

 

P.S

Another example of how great user experience matters. Check out how to program in WPF in its official site

Windows Mobile 6.5 Officially Announced

Microsoft just announce Windows Mobile. I have copied some of the comments from a post in Channel 10.

The New Look of 6.5

The Windows Mobile 6.5 software features a brand-new home screen with improved touchscreen interface. The interface resembles a “honeycomb” with hexagonal tiles for each program – a UI that promises to be more “finger friendly.” The 6.5 software allows for “fat finger touching” on a resistive touch screen so you can make more precise touches without need of a stylus.

The new interface also lets you go directly to your voicemail, text messages, and email, right from the Lock Screen:

My Phone

As for the services shipping with Windows Mobile, the free My Phone service lets you manage and backup your personal info from your device to a password-protected web service. This makes upgrading from phone to phone easier since data can easily be restored from web to phone.  The service also provides a portal where mobile content – like personal photos – can be shared with others. My Phone is currently an invitation-only beta.

Obama is a PC??

Read an interesting article that says that President Barack Obama is a PC. Don’t know whether that’s true, but it sure is interesting info to share.

 

Some excerpts from the article.

Exhibit A: "He sees the Intel logo every morning." (Okay, it’s the only exhibit. But I’ve always wanted to say "Exhibit A," and this seemed like a good opportunity.) Now, many Apple products do use Intel chips, right? Mac systems, though — as the sharp folks over at All Things Digital, who first noticed the sure-to-be-contentious quote, point out — don’t flash the logo around in the way that PCs do. So, even if it’s just a result of the White House’s Windows system stockpile, it looks like the leader of the free world is likely a man of Microsoft.

Check out the full article here. Uh Oh, Apple Fans: Looks Like Obama Uses a PC

The rise of citizen journalism

Citizen journalism according to Wikipedia

Citizen journalism, also known as public or participatory journalism or democratic journalism[1], is the act of non-professionals “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,” according to the seminal report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires

I’m always amaze on how technology has put more power to people. Now blogs, Twitter, Facebook are gradually replacing traditional journalism in providing first hand news to the public. There are countless example of how technology have change how news are brought to us.

The first picture of the US Airways crash was actually provided by one of its passenger via Twitter. Janis Krums from Sarasota, Florida posts the first photo of U.S. Airways flight on Twitter. These are the little things that amaze me on the power of technology.

So its not surprising that even Dell uses Twitter to promote its product.Check it out here on how Dell use Twitter to promote its product

 us-air-hudson-full.jpg

Microsoft Launched “Wonderwall” in MSN site

Microsoft just launched “wonderwall” for readers to have a fun place to check out the celebrity gossip. Basically it runs on flash and allows people to scroll and browse through their favorite gossip.

Personally i think that this is a good idea but I’m not too thrill about it.

To me, this is only a catchy way to create a “one stop celebrity gossip” wall but would it attracts throng of people to visit it? I don’t think so. Personally, i don’t think it creates that much of a pull factor for people to go in. At the end of the day, its just a nice way to display existing data from MSN entertainment.

But hey, I might be wrong as I’m definitely not a fan of celebrity gossip and could not care less whether who dates Brad Pitt or what’s the latest celebrity couple who just got divorce.

 

Here’s some info from a site that reported on how Microsoft would like to differentiate this site from others.

Microsoft hopes to differentiate the site in two main ways:

Visually. "This site really makes use of the screen real estate. It uses large, beautiful photography, creates great, rich slide shows, video within the experience itself," Bennett said. Wonderwall will attempt to "decommoditize" the stream of celebrity images available from providers such as WireImage by packaging it in interesting ways and applying a unique "spin and voice" on top of it.

Editorially. The site will try to strike a balance between the "catty, snarky almost to the point of disrespectful" tone of TMZ, Defamer and PerezHilton on one end, and the "puff piece, always-positive on celebrities" tone of sites such as People.com," he said.

 

wonderwall

Microsoft Community Day – 13th Feb 2009

Microsoft User Groups is having a community day on the 13th February. They are lining up cool and exciting demos about Microsoft Sharepoint, Visual Studio Team System, System Center and Microsoft SQL server.

Do sign yourself up via Facebook

MicrosoftCommunityDay