Farmville For Dummies

Coming out today: 245 pages of instructions on how to "download the app and start your farm", "create your farmer avatar" and spend hours obsessively clicking on stuff.  Angela and Kyle, my hat's off to your genius. $12.50 on Amazon.

Wireless Power Lightens Up Cereal Boxes

"eCoupled intelligent wireless power is so flexible it can actually be printed directly onto packaging. A low-cost enhancement to product packaging, printed coils allow real-time communication from the package to the store shelf, and then to the store’s inventory management system. Product quantities can be identified and tracked, expiration dates monitored, and new stock automatically ordered when supplies are low to help reduce lost sales."
-- via PCWorld, LogoDesignWorks

Bill Gates In a Wall Street Journal Ad (1984)

via

Cable-Cutting Experiment [Video]

We invited several families to give up their cable and instead use a “connected TV” device for one week following last Christmas. We interviewed them before and after, and left them Flip cameras to record their experiences.

The video is below, and here's the post with background info and a recap of our findings.

Tune Into #TVnext on Friday

@HillHolliday is hosting a conference about the future of television tomorrow (Fri, Jan 28). Tune into our Ustream channel if you have a minute. The speaker line-up is pretty awesome: we are expecting people from NBC, Microsoft Interactive Entertainment, Boxee, GoogleTV, Hulu, Xfinity, FiOS, TiVo, Hulu and many other companies in the field.

I also have a couple of pieces of research going live at the event. One is an experiment about living without cable, and the other one is a survey of TV content availability across devices; they will be presented at the 12.30pm (EST) and 2.30pm panels respectively.

Electronic Blackboard Transmits Writing Over Phone Lines (1974)

"A new, experimental system devised by Bell Labs may make an old teaching tool more alluring. Called an electronic blackboard, it uses ordinary (and low-cost) telephone lines to send writing that is chalked on a pressure-sensitive surface to any remote point for TV-screen display. The audio portion of a lecture or other presentation can, if needed, be sent via a second phone line, using a portable conference phone available commercially. The system is being tried out at the University of Illinois."
-- Popular Science, June 1974

AdLab Featured on Pulse

Pulse, "the iPad's most gorgeous newsreader" praised by Steve Jobs himself, is even more gorgeous this morning because today it lists this very blog among its featured sources. As if iPad weren't shipping enough units already.

If you are a Pulse reader, welcome and here's the kind of stuff you've been missing for the past six years:

- A "Try Again" button for Google
- A lovingly illustrated post on the evolution of ads in sports video games
- 10 tips for ad-supported start-ups
- Mad Men Against The Machine, or how we soon will be advertising to robots instead of people
- Lots of good old media
- A collection of offbeat creative work

-- tweet by @ehunteryoung

Two Alternative Verizon iPhone Commercials

Long before yesterday's Verizon iPhone teaser aired on TV, fans had begun cutting their own ads in anticipation of the great day, some as early as April of last year. Below are the two best ones.

I need service, demands a half-naked girl:




We've got three words:



If you are lucky, you'll fall into a time-space warp and see an AT&T ad for its iPhone served by Google at the end of the second spot for Verizon, like so:

Ten Years Of "This Will Be The Year Of"

"2000 will be the year of free Internet" (IDC)

"2001 will be the year of the Internet appliance." (Chicago Tribune).

"2002 will be the year of the clones." (New Scientist)

"2003 will be the year of the blog" (Instapundit)

"2004 will be the year of the analysis engine." (ieee.org)

"2005 is year of local mobile search" (O'Reilly)

"2006: the year of vidcasting and advercasting" (Steve Rubel)

"2007 will be the year of the widget" (Newsweek, original)

"2008 will be the year of web TV." (Techradar)

"2009 will be the year of the uber blog" (Inquisitr)

"2010 will be the year TV and the web really converge." (Guardian)

Bonus track:
"2001 will be the year that website operators come to their collective senses and start charging customers for service." (Jakob Nielsen)

Things That Should Have Happened by 2011, Edison's Version

As a follow up to an earlier post about old predictions for 2011, here's what Edison thought back in 1911 would happen "a hundred years hence":

"Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound."

Sounds like Kindle.

-- Paleofuture