Canon's Lens-Shaped Thermos Hits eBay

This thermos styled after the iconic white L lens that Canon was giving away to the lucky press during Vancouver Olympics is easily the awesomest piece of schwag I've ever seen and written about. They are now hitting eBay, and this one is already up to over $100 with two days of bidding left. I bet it will go for more than an actual non-Canon lens of similar properties.

Looks like a manufacturer in China has decided to ride the wave, because there's a bunch of eBay offers for pre-ordering one "directly from the OEM", due for shipping in mid-April.

This Banner Sucks

This banner ad for Vax vacuum apparently "identifies the bad cookies on your computer and cleans them out", although I wish I could actually see the cookies it lists. Still, pretty cool.
- via agencyspy

Review Schrute Farms on TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has a page (just featured in NYT) where people can and early do leave their impressions of Schrute Farms owned by, who else, Dwight Schrute from The Office.  Kind of like Kayak selling tickets for Oceanic 815.

Book: How To Design Marketing Games

Just got a note about the newly published Game-Based Marketing (on Amazon for around $16), a guide to designing loyalty programs and other game-like marketing programs based on the understanding of gamers' typologies and psychology.  Very much look forward to my copy; can't believe it hasn't been written sooner. And if this book sounds like fun to you, check out an excerpt from a book that covers some of the same ground.

Update [March 2011] - I've read the book and posted a review.

The Appstorization of Everyday Things

I got my iPhone finally upgraded to 3.x.x and went on a buying spree, filling an entire screen with all sorts of photo apps that range from nifty (QuadCam) to awesome (DSLR Remote). And then I'm sitting there, thinking:  if printers can have app stores and so can digital pens, why not digital cameras? All these apps that turn the iPhone into a usable camera -- what if they all lived inside a device that was actually designed to take pictures?

Camera manufacturers keep competing on megapixel counts,  but that's largely a dead end. I'd take an ability to customize the device with a custom interface and features to suit my needs over a meaningless handful of extra megapixels every day.

AdAge ran a great piece the other day about the coming Internet of things.  The appstorization is another part of the same trend; it's about enhancing every day consumer devices with third-party software purchased through the devices themselves that turn these devices into something slightly new.

That's the real magic of the iPhone -- its endless pliability. It doesn't really look like a phone, it doesn't have any of the traditional phone's affordances.  It's a screen and a button, and every new app you download from the store turns the device into a completely new thing: a Scrabble board, an air hockey table, a TV remote, an ocarina.

I don't know if I want my camera double as a Scrabble board, but I'd try this app.

Update (May 3, 2010): "Wireless Industry Partnership lists 68 known application stores (up from 34 only a few months ago)." - GetElastic

Burger King Puts Puts Ads On Digg's Empty Searches

As promised, Burger King is now running ads on Digg's search pages that return no results. Pretty cool, although not as cool as ASCII images in Digg's source code for Inferno.

CAPTCHA Advertising Closer to Reality

Two enterprising dudes from Germany are trying to patent CAPTCHA advertising, with a twist: the CAPTCHA message will be contained in a video ad. "User needs to pay close attention to the advertising video clip in order to gain access to the requested content. This way, the user cannot use advertising blocking programs, close the advertising or ignore the advertising, if the user wants to gain access to the requested content."

They look pretty serious about it, too -- this website must be theirs. Stateside, they will be competing with  adcaptcher.com and adscaptcha.com.  And with Microsoft, for that matter, who has submitted a similar patent application last year.




But ha!  Five years too late, I say. How about some well-documented prior art? Not to mention an existing working WordPress plugin or an actual product?

[And check this out: the website where I found the first patent adds a link to itself to your clipboard as you right-click/copy the text, at least in Chrome. Nifty.]

Hey, @PeterKim - Have You Seen This?

Not only can you add hashtags to your blog headlines, you can also add @'s, and that, too, will get picked up by aggregators like this one (or, if you have an RSS-to-Twitter set-up, that).  Which gives you an interesting new way to pitch your blog post to someone you want to read it; in my case, Peter Kim, the managing director over at Dachis (hi, Peter).




Addressable blogging, so to speak.

Hope I haven't just put a nuclear suitcase into the hands of the dark side of the Make Money Online crowd.

#Hashtags in #Blog #Posts #About #Advertising

Let's find out if the #hashtags in this post's headline will show up in the tweets by aggregator bots on Twitter.

Stay tuned.

Update: Yup. Works. Check this out.

The Last Inaccurate Video on Earth

Look, ma, another graph that has nothing to do with reality! (There's a whole book of those.)

FITC would've been better served by commissioning a remix of the Downfall clip, or a Trololo spoof, or pretty much anything else instead of this scaremongering The Last Ad Agency on Earth ridiculousness.

And what's up with this bathroom shot?  It either should look, um, used to show that the guy was vaporized on the can, or the magazine needs to be pushed aside to show that he finished, flushed and left, and then was vaporized.