Korean Company Shows Prototype Of Pocket-Size Projector

image: The Korea Times

I'm a couple of weeks late with this news, but apparently we are inching closer to having mini-projectors in our pockets. The Korea Times wrote about a company called Iljin Display that demonstrated a prototype of "a coin-size laser video projector module that can fit into portable gadgets such as mobile phones and digital cameras. The smallest of the demonstrated prototypes was about the size of a packet of cigarettes, and the company explained that it could be reduced to the size of a matchbox by the end of the year. Using the technology, users can project photos and video images on the wall from the built-in projector, making a seven-inch, full-color screen."

Also watch Light Blue Optics that released their evalution kit to manufacturers earlier this year.

Earlier:
Siemens Shows Off Phone With Projector
Future: Virtual (Not Only) Keyboard
Future: Personal Video Projectors

Hasbro Bottles Play-Doh Fragrance

"For the first time, Hasbro has bottled that fresh, just-out-of-the-can, "eau de PLAY-DOH" aroma into a limited-edition fragrance as part of a year-long celebration of the beloved modeling compound's 50th birthday. Out in time for Mother's Day, the 1-ounce, spray bottle fragrance is meant for highly-creative people, who seek a whimsical scent reminiscent of their childhood." Buy yours at Demeter Fragrance, a company that also makes such scents as Chocolate Chip Cookie, Birthday Cake and Holy Smoke.
-- press release via Influx Insights

Earlier:
Marketers Should Create Multisensory Campaigns
Smelly Packaging Encourages Impulse Purchase
Smelly Postage Stamps

White Noise on Future of Advertising

White Noise Magazine runs a feature on the future of advertising with plenty of references to my favorite Minority Report and with different experts chiming in on their technologies of choice. The article's conclusion? "What is certain is ads will not disappearing anytime soon. That, and it'll be awhile before eyeball transplants become the only way to avoid them." Don't think eyeball transplants will help, though.

I wrote a somewhat wordy reply back when Janna Zittrer, the author, kindly asked me for an opinion about what advertising might look like 25 years from now. Understandably, some things didn't survive the editor's scissors, but luckily I have my own medium now so here's the full version:

"Fifty or even 25 years is a very long time when it comes to media and advertising innovation. Anyone attempting to look that far ahead is bound to make statements that our children will find amuzingly rediculous, like the famous quote by an IBM chairman about there being a market for only five computers. Consider this:

Fifty years ago, we were only beginning to have color television, The Wizard of Oz had just premiered on TV, a remote control had just been invented, and VCRs were still a long way ahead. Twenty-five years ago, Pac-Man was a popular novelty, CNN was one year old, and cell phones were yet to be introduced. Ten years ago, watching a movie online was still a dream. Five years ago, the world didn't know anything about iPods and podcasts, Google had just begun to sell its ads, and blogging was still a fringe nerdy thing to do.

It is impossible to outline the future of advertising without attempting to imagine the society in which it will be operating. This is both an exciting and a terribly daunting task, a subject so complex that it inspires entire books and university departments, but neccessary if we are to understand what patterns, trends, practices, and laws are likely to emerge in the future.

Advertising practices at any given moment are also inextricably connected with the existing state of the media. On the one hand, advertisers create some of the market forces that influence media development. On the other hand, the prevailing media formats define what and how is advertised. So, if we blatantly overlook the complexities of predicting the path of social progress and pretend that the society of 2030 is the same as the society of 2006, we will still need to focus on developments in media technology to imagine what advertising might look like 25 years from now.

I hesitate to make "predictions" in part to avoid responsibility for the ones that don't come out, so consider what follows a wishlist, like that of a kid writing a letter to Santa after visiting a toy factory.

A lot of the advertising things that you see in Minority Report are likely to happen. People have advanced pretty far in their work on gesture-based interfaces, for example, but even the pieces necessary for the highly personalized advertising are already here. Will you be greeted by name by a Gap billboard when you come into their store in 2030? Yes, only it probably won't be a billboard.

• The basic forms of the "holographic" displays featured in the movie are already on the market today. Are twenty-five years enough for the technology to catch on? Definitely.
  
  
• Electronic paper will give birth to a new kind of medium that will combine the interconnected portability of a cell phone with the richness of web.
  
  
• More advertising messages will be embedded directly into the content people consume.
  
  
• Consumers will be advertisers' most important medium.
  
  
• More and more ads will be finding their way into consumers' homes through routes other than mass media.
  
  
• Some advertising will be targeted not at humans but at their robotic assistants powered by artificial intelligence to make the most optimal purchase decisions.
  
  
• On the same note, many advertising-related tasks will be done by robots; telemarketers and flyer-givers are most likely to be replaced first.
  
  
• Online shopping will change dramatically. People will be able not only to order things online, but also to have them manufactured right in their homes on the machines that are now known as rapid prototyping printers.
  
  
• Someone will brand the sky."

Forbes: YouTube Burns $1M Monthly

Forbes runs a great article whose main point is that people who benefit most in a gold rush are the ones selling shovels: YouTube's "bandwidth costs, which increase every time a visitor clicks on a video, may be approaching $1 million a month--much of which goes to provider Limelight Networks."

A smarter model? "Gilles BianRosa, chief executive of BitTorrent-software maker Azureus, says peer-to-peer networking could save his company 95% in hosting costs when it launches a community-based video site in the next few months."

Exent's Tech Puts Ads in Old, Pirated Games

I'm not sure how exactly this works, but there's a new player on the in-game advertising field - Exent Technologies - that claims its technology can put ads in the games that are already on the market through either legitimate or pirate channels. Some bits from the press release:

• The solution allows for the enablement of in-game ads without the need to access the video game's source code or any SDK integration.
• Exent provides, through its patent-pending technology, the only solution that allows publishers to easily add in-game advertising capabilities at any stage of the product life cycle - during development, post-production and even after the games have been deployed and installed on users' machines.
• Apply in-game advertising for games that were never equipped to have it enabled, even for games already purchased and used by consumers.
• Identify pirated copies and create campaigns to salvage revenues from them, no matter how old the title is and when it is cracked.

Bomb Squad Blows Up Tricked Out News Box

image: MSNBC

LA Times and Paramount Pictures placed a digital music device designed to play the "Mission: Impossible" theme tune in 4,500 news boxes; the music would sound when the door was opened. Someone saw the protruding wires and the red plastic boxes and called in the bomb squad, and one of the boxes got blown up. Priceless.
-- MSNBC, My Way News

Exent Places Ads in Old, Pirated Games

I'm not sure how exactly this works, but there's a new player on the in-game advertising field - Exent Technologies - that claims its technology can put ads in the games that are already on the market through either legitimate or pirate channels. Some bits from the press release:

• The solution allows for the enablement of in-game ads without the need to access the video game's source code or any SDK integration.
• Exent provides, through its patent-pending technology, the only solution that allows publishers to easily add in-game advertising capabilities at any stage of the product life cycle - during development, post-production and even after the games have been deployed and installed on users' machines.
• Apply in-game advertising for games that were never equipped to have it enabled, even for games already purchased and used by consumers.
• Identify pirated copies and create campaigns to salvage revenues from them, no matter how old the title is and when it is cracked.

Companies Embrace RSS Despite Low Adoption

Jupiter Research: "Seventy-one percent of site operators are planning to spend $50,000 or more on RSS during 2006, despite low perceived adoption rates and lack of definitive measurement standards."

Next: Contextual Video Advertising

"Dave.tv, whose CEO Rex Wong was the guy who created the technology that became Google's AdSense, has launched and will soon offer contextual-based advertising for video. This technology reportedly will allow ad association with keywords in the video content."
-- ClickZ

Advertising in Electronic Newspaper

image: i-wisdom

You already know about Belgian De Tijd's trial of electronic newspaper and about similar experiments in NY Times, but what about advertising? Belgian i-merge says their agency is "the first company who has been experimenting with advertising on this new device."

"The image above shows you an advertising for internetbank Rabobank.be (one of our clients). The tagline says: "2002 - Rabobank.be launched the bank without paper", referring to the device, which is hosting the first newspaper without paper."

In case you were wondering, that's what De Tijd looks like in its electronic incarnation:


image: i-merge

-- via comments on Futurelab (which also illustrates how useful it is to leave comments on others' blogs and the strange ways in which information travels).