Category Archives: reTransmit

cool things I’ve learned from others directly or found online which hopefully relate to the core topics of the blog

Personalized Marketing aka CRM

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Adage (free registration) has a revealing article online that’s tied to virtual spaces (even though it may not seem like it is). It’s called “In Search of Marketing’s Future“. You can guess some of what that future is if I’m talking about it. From the article:

The event {Outlook 2005}, which came one year after McDonald’s CMO Larry Light declared the death of mass marketing, made clear that there is life after that death — namely in the form of hyper-targeted one-to-one marketing strategies that use a variety of technologies.

That sounds sufficiently innocent; almost friendly even. As do a couple other quotables. But here’s the a piece of the article that caught my attention:

“We built this huge umbrella. We looked strongly and deeply at the internet,” Mr. Weedfald said. “The internet has very little value unless you understand the back end of something called CRM. It’s about tracking, converting and retaining customers 24 hours a day, utilizing the power of wireless and the internet.”

Is now a good time to talk about the “tracking” and spying tools that are already employed in virtual worlds? These comments sure make it sound like Big Brother has siblings. Should that be “restraining”?

WorldChanging 3000

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In the event you’re visiting this site and not regularly stopping over on the WorldChanging.com site (a highly recommended visit), the good folks at WC asked me to contribute an entry. I did and you can read it here. Obviously, as soon as I set up the dropbox, I’ll be taking donations to send me to writing class. Hopefully the message gets out in spite of my limitations.

[Edit from the future: As the WorldChanging site is now long gone and I have no idea what I wrote for them, here’s a link to something I suspect is related: “Making the Virtual Real”]

Dreaming With The Big Boys

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Design News has posted an article discussing the future of simulation systems as integrated product design and test tools (among other things); a subject that’s near and dear to me. It’s a nice article and well worth the read. From the entry:

Bevilaqua gained insight into some of Lockheed’s stickiest design issues. He learned about the advantages of shortening the turn radius of the F-35 and found ways to use software to cut the qualification times for air-to-air refueling of the F-18. He also applied his game expertise to the study of so-called “viffing” (vectoring in forward flight) on the AV-8B Harrier, thus improving the aircraft’s maneuverability.

“Sometimes, you can know the equations, but not really know the physics,” Bevilaqua notes. “That’s what the games did for us: They taught us the real physics behind the equations.”

All that from playing videogames. That’s a pretty powerful statement.

You’ll also see three letters pop-up in the article: PLM. They’ve been getting some play here over the past month or so, but I now consider “product lifecycle management” a limited way of defining the potential for this kind of software integration (I’ve already written a first draft for an entry to be posted on the SLSalon blog that deals with this – should be up within the week). I suspect a new definition for what this stuff is morphing into will eventually emerge – I don’t think of people as products.

Long Tail 3D Mental Images

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Long Tail Toroid Evolution in Second Life Simulation

I’ve been toying with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail ideas for a few months now; turning them over in my head and trying to resolve some perceived discontinuities: “cult” items, functions of Time, aso. All this in order to arrive at a more complete unified theory, I guess. I’ve even used Second Life as a way to help visualize and discuss these ideas (see above image). Last night I finally grabbed some time to model and render my latest 3D models which I collectively call the “ecoToroid” (I went 3D after seeing those “signal to noise” graphs; and especially that “Sales vs Stuff” image).

As I commented on The Long Tail blog, I’m guilty of not giving this the attention it probably deserves; especially in trying to figure out what this thing looks like in a historical context – I’ve already modified my 3D models once and I could see where they could use more thought and further modification (maybe even reverting back to something more like what I had originally). Perhaps later when I have more time. Anyway, instead of trying to explain what I’m thinking, I’m just going to post a couple of images and see what happens. Maybe these will spark ideas in someone else’s mind. Maybe not. But I figure it’s better than letting these things sit on my hard drive.

The Long Tail Curve as a Partial Section of a Time Dependent Function - Obscurity vs Distribution

Three Long Tale Sections at Distinct Points in Time

I also thought I would open up the comments on this entry. Typically I don’t allow for comments simply because the spam I get is too much bother to deal with on a blog as obscure as this one. There’s also the fact that I need to mod the code so the comment block width works on all browsers; right now you can type well outside the boundary in IE I think – sorry about that. If you want to leave a comment, I’d suggest typing it in a text editor and doing a cut ‘n paste. Hopefully in the near future I’ll fix this page so it’s a little nicer. Til then….

(edit: O-kay. Seems as if opening up one post to comments opens up the others, even though their commenting has been closed. Must be in the WordPress code but I just don’t have time to find out. Having just mass deleted about 500 spam comments, looks like it’s time to close the door for a bit. Oh well.)

(images Copyright © C. Sven Johnson)