Harness and Monitor or Die?

BrandWeek posted an Adweek piece earlier this month, “Study: Cyber Presence Key to Sales” (Link), that should be of interest to a wide range of people; not just brand advertisers and marketers. In particular, I found this excerpt relevant to many of the virtual world/product development topics I cover here:

“We are absolutely certain that marketing must urgently harness interactive media and the behaviors it induces. … Consumers expect every brand or service to present itself in some kind of online environment, and expect this presence to be of use or interest and to furnish a substantial or involving experience,” the study says. That experience lies at the heart of consumer engagement, one of the four “pillars” that the study lays out as a general framework for effective online marketing.
Continue reading

Smart Vending

I suppose there are a few people who wonder why I find vending machines interesting and blog about them. I’ll try to keep this short and to the point:

1) Vending machines can fabricate an item on demand. Example: the Pouchlink system (reLink)

2) Vending machines can be significant point-of-sale locations. Example: Automated C-Stores (reLink)

3) Vending machines can sell “niche” products. Example: the Art-o-mat (reLink)
Continue reading

To Encode The World

When I read the entry on O’Reilly Radar (Link) that Google had acquired the rights to the technology used by the Stanford team to win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, the first thing that ran through my mind was that they could use swarms of autonomous aerial vehicles (or “swarmanoids” – reLink) that might look something like the police drones now being used in the UK. Sure sounds like my earlier disappointment, that the swarmanoids had no links to virtual worlds, might now be reversed. From the O’Reilly post: Continue reading