By Linda Forrest
This past week, Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness about global warming. No recount was necessary.
The blogosphere’s response, as is often the media’s reaction to anything pertaining to Mr. Gore, ranges from adulation to vitriol.
We have had the pleasure of doing some work to promote local presentations of Mr. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth slide show about global warming, as presented by the Delphi Group’s president and CEO, Mike Gerbis. The Delphi Group is a strategic consulting firm operating within the spheres of health and the environment, clean energy, climate change, environmental technologies and organizational sustainability.
Mr. Gerbis was one of 1,000 people and one of just a few Canadians who were selected to train personally with Mr. Gore as part of the Climate Project and is officially sanctioned to give his slideshow presentation as seen in the Academy Award-winning film.
Mr. Gore, who sits on the board of directors for Apple, has had more than his fair share of trouble with the media, but that hasn’t stopped him from spearheading a novel approach to television with Current, a web site that has for the past several years accepted submissions from professional videographers and as of Monday now asks viewers to submit content in order to create broadcast news. Read more here.
While it appears that the site incorporates some elements of other popular video sites, the real distinction is that the best of the online content runs on Current TV, a cable and satellite TV network that according to the site airs in 52 million homes around the world. As with YouTube and Joost, content will determine the success of the site itself but if Current can bridge the gap between video on the Internet and content on the television, Mr. Gore will have another winner on his hands.
By Jill Pyle
According to the recent Earth to Tech blog entry Your Bad Code Is Killing My Planet, “virtualization and on-demand computing are giving companies new reasons to worry about code efficiency.”
Alistair Croll, vice president of product management and co-founder of Coradiant, writes about how applications with inefficient code require more processing power, storage and bandwidth. When deployed on a large scale, inefficient applications ultimately require more energy to run.
This makes me wonder, will more companies start coding for energy efficiency and promoting their applications as green?
By Linda Forrest
My Dad is what is called an “early adopter.” I’ve always given my parents jocular grief about the many “gadgets” that they have but their interest in cutting edge technologies has been prevalent throughout my entire life and provided me with an advantage in my education and later, my career.
A tremendous gift that my parents gave me was the introduction of computers to my life at a very young age. I literally do not remember a time before computers, which is rare amongst my peers in their late twenties and early thirties. I was typing before I could write longhand and have used a plethora of applications through the years, from word processing on up to audio engineering software.
An incredibly intelligent man with a technological mind, my father was always interested in computers and wrote programs for my brother and me when we were young. The family loves to tell stories about me, a toddler, being held upright by my brother so that I could type “run” on the keyboard to make the application do its thing.
As technology has advanced, my Dad has kept up and is without a doubt the most tech-savvy sixty-something that I know. He was a webmaster for the site of my parents’ business and his various social groups before most people knew what a web site was. He got involved with a messageboard that connects him with people he hasn’t seen in 50 years and uses Skype to talk with his old shipmates around the world.
Because of his interest in and willingness to learn about new technology, my parents have the whole world at their fingertips – emailing, surfing the web, online banking, VoIP and more are a snap for them. My friend’s mother communicates with her and her brother almost exclusively by text message. Family friends in their 70s who travel a lot keep us up to date on their journeys via email. In stark contrast, I know people in this age group who don’t have an answering machine and are still convinced that this “computer thing” shall pass.
As our population gets older and the huge numbers of baby boomers enter their senior years, which group do you think is more prevalent – those who embrace technology and are learning how to use it to enrich their lives? Or those who want no part of it and are convinced that the ATM is no substitute for going up to the teller? How will marketing to this age group change as time goes on?
By Jill Pyle
Yesterday, Google acquired Jaiku, a tool for sharing your online activity stream or, as some have come to call it, lifestream. With Jaiku, you don’t have to bounce around the internet to see what your friends have been up to. Instead, you can view their latest Twitter status, flickr photos, Google Reader shared items, blog posts and Facebook updates all in one place.
Jaiku has decided to focus on innovation instead of scaling and is currently not accepting any new users. Once their doors reopen, I’m sure lots of people will be eager to create lifestreams. With Google backing a service like Jaiku, I think it’s only a matter of time before we see lifestreams go mainstream.
By Danny Sullivan
It probably depends who you ask, doesn’t it? Still, at this week’s BioPartnering Europe conference in London, there were definitely some positive signs for those companies striving for success in this battered market.
The conference was thick with representatives from big pharma – many senior executives were present and there appeared to be a renewed appetite for the acquisition of new technology.
One pleasantly surprised delegate was Rainer Engelhardt, CEO of GangaGen, which develops bacteriophage-based treatments for infectious disease.
“I have definitely noticed a sense of optimism and enthusiasm for the future,” said Engelhardt.” The presence of big pharma is very encouraging, and there are signs that they are beginning to take an interest in infectious disease again, which is good news for GangaGen.”
It’s still early days, of course, and from a PR firm’s perspective, it’s a long way from being an ideal market. But there were enough positive rumblings from some of the executives we met to justify this company’s continued interest in the sector.
Many smaller biotech companies view PR as a non-essential function that can be handled by someone internally, as and when the need arises. And to a certain degree, this is probably true, but the benefit of taking a more strategic approach to the area of one’s business cannot be underestimated. Rather than simply making sporadic announcements about company and product developments, PR can also be an effective tool to help support the drive towards business goals such as financing, partnerships, licensing deals and so on, as well as simply helping to keep awareness up during the periods between news events.
Of course, strategic PR requires a budget, so here’s hoping this positive attitude at BioPartnering is a sign of what is still to come.
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Getting your customers to talk
October 05, 2007 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan In today’s noisy technology markets, the media invariably seek ways to separate the most useful stories from the rest. As a result, the ability to deliver a customer perspective has become a significant barrier to entry for getting quality vendor ink. And this presents one of the greatest challenges for technology vendors […]
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From consulting service to software product
October 03, 2007 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran My colleague Danny last week highlighted the worthy achievement of Scotland’s Graham Technology in winning Best Product at Call Centre Expo for its customer interaction platform ciboodle. The award capped a year of focused marketing since ciboodle was first launched. But the achievement was much more than a year in the making. […]
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Joost for everyone!
October 02, 2007 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Yesterday, Joost, a peer-to-peer streaming TV service, launched its public beta and the blogosphere is aflutter with comments – some positive, some negative but most fall into the wait and see category. Web-savvy folks have been beta testing this system for quite some time but now, it’s open to everyone. As with […]
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Buzzwords to know: Bacn
October 01, 2007 by Jill Pyle
By Jill Pyle Spam has been invading my inbox for years. Even with filters and blacklists, it always finds a way in. At the best of times it’s annoying, at the worst it hinders productivity. Since registering for services like Facebook, Twitter, Aeroplan and Google news alerts, my spam count has been trumped by bacn. […]
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Reflections on the i-LIMB Hand
September 28, 2007 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Sometimes, it can be challenging to draw the connection between technological advancements and one’s personal life. Such is definitely not the case with a recent media launch that we did for a new client. Earlier this year, inmedia had the incredible experience of being responsible for the worldwide media launch of Touch […]
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A business (2.0) titan bows out
September 28, 2007 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran My favourite magazine arrived this week clad in a plain-paper wrapping. No, not that kind of magazine, or that kind of plain-paper wrapping. Rather, it was the October 2007 issue of Business 2.0, which announced on a white, wrap-around cover that this is my last issue. I knew this was coming — […]
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Canada ragging the puck on cleantech
September 27, 2007 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran While the rest of the world is moving like legendary ice-hockey great Wayne Gretzky by reading the play and positioning itself to be “where the puck is headed,” Canada is in danger of being called for delay of game, according to Ottawa-born clean technology guru Nicholas Parker, who was the keynote speaker […]
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Congratulations ciboodle
September 27, 2007 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan More from Call Centre Expo. I just have to say a big well done to Graham Technology for winning the show’s Best Product award for its customer interaction platform, ciboodle. I have had the fortune of working with Graham Technology since ciboodle’s launch last year, and the marketing team made achieving this […]
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