My Mom, The Addict

So, I had the immense pleasure of enjoying a fine meal in New York City, at má pêche, last night with Bubs.  Nothing like a fine meal with family.  What amazed me more than the great drinks, great food, and catching up with mom was her self-admitted addiction to her iPad.  She sleeps with it!  Wait until Dick finds out...

She not only admitted she loves her iPad and doesn't know what she would do without it, but she has downloaded and uses apps on her iPhone and iPad like CardStar and Zite, without consulting her IT department!  That would be me, of course.

Frankly, it's amazing at so many levels.  She has bought, used, and loves this technology, without her nerdy son promoting it or provoking her.  She has done things with her devices that I have not.  She told me that her iPhone makes communication so much easier.  Even Nielsen is seeing that Americans aged 55-64 are adopting smartphones at second fastest rate of all other age groups.  What is this world coming to?

I don't know whether to feel sad and shed a tear that she's growing up right in front of me, or be angry that she would do all of this without consulting me.  I feel so...cheap.

Come see me and other industry leaders from Sam's Club, BBC America, The Daily, Ogilvy & Mather, Nutro, The Weather Channel, and Starcom Mediavest talk about tablets in marketing at ad:tech New York City this Thursday at 3:00PM Eastern and 4:30PM Eastern.  If you can't make it, tell a friend and live vicariously through them!

Darn Youth!

I have often said that after the introduction of the iPad, and watching how my kids interact with modern smart phones and tablets, they will look at our computing as my generation looks at mainframes and minis.  It's not that they won't use it, but it will be like my computer classes back in college, in the late 80s, when I had to do my assignment in the CS building from a terminal connected to the mini.  Why would you want to?

It's not just smartphones and tablets either.  All of the technology trends that we create that catch-on with our youth and later seep into older society.  Yet, we as adults have designed these innovations.  Is it because we know more, but still can think and act like children.  I've been accused of acting like a child, quite often, around the house, actually.

It just made me think this morning of what if we gave a design brief or creative brief to kids?  What would they come up with?  Sure, a bunch of it would be nuts, but I'd have to think there would be an awesome idea in there that most adults, no matter how much vodka, would not come up with.

Maybe we should give them an Etch-A-Sketch and let them have at it?

Tablets in Marketing at ad:tech

Come see me and other industry leaders from Sam's Club, BBC America, The Daily, Ogilvy & Mather, Nutro, The Weather Channel, and Starcom Mediavest talk about tablets in marketing at ad:tech New York City next Thursday at 3:00PM Eastern and 4:30PM Eastern.  If you can't make it, I'll miss you, but tell a friend who can!

Friction

If you clicked the link to this post thinking that I was going to be talking motor oil or sexual aids, I'm going to disappoint.

As my colleague, Eric Swayne (@eswayne), likes to say: social media is not doing anything new, it reduces the friction for something that people already do.  It's a great barometer for the usefulness and value for many mobile or digital projects.  Does this reduce the friction?  Substantially?  Was there no friction to begin with?  That's probably a sign that you are not solving a real problem.

I think its a great barometer for a lot of what we do in digital and mobile marketing.  What friction are we reducing?  I was using an online ordering site for a restaurant the other night, and it took me 10 minutes to enter an order, for what takes less than 1 minute to do by phone.  The implementation on the site was pretty, but it was clearly inefficient.  It added friction, and I likely won't go back again.

The friction of finding, flipping through, and locating the number in the yellow pages became a barrier when it was easier to find the phone number of a local business on the computer.  Now, it's even easier to find it on my mobile.  Apple implements Siri on the iPhone 4S, and if it works, it will become even easier to find that same phone number.  Smaller digital friction coefficient.

Just like electricity, people will choose the path of least resistance.  What's your product's digital friction coefficient?

Saturday Morning Cartoons

As I sit here and type, at the crack of dawn this fine Saturday morning, my son's cat, Polly, sleeps, purring, on the hot-plate known as my Apple Time Capsule.  With only a peanut-sized brain, I don't expect her to have any remorse or shame for waking me up, and, if I 'm honest with myself, I've been getting up this side of the crack of dawn since I was very small.  I'm sure Bubs would be the first one to point this fact out, and she probably has a few extra gray hairs, with my names on them, to prove it.

When I was a kid, it was fun getting up Saturday morning.  Heck, I distinctly remember going out and shooting hoops in our driveway when I would wake up.  I can not imagine what our neighbors must have thought, and its shocking that I never heard from them about it.  For most of my childhood, we literally got only a handful of channels on the television.  When not torturing the neighbors with the pounding of the basketball on blacktop, I would pour myself a bowl of cereal, or cook pancakes swimming in butter, plop down in front of our television and watch whatever was shown.  There was not much choice then, especially for niches like cartoons, so you took what you got.

I watch my kids grow up today, and they really are the DVR Generation, in that regard.  My daughter truly does not understand the concept of live programming.  Sorry, Nielsen.  They have an expectation of any content, anywhere, on any device.  As a parent, it's occasionally frustrating, but as a technologist, it's fascinating.  If I think forward and assume the continued reduction of storage costs, the improvement in network throughput, and the improved services and content availability on the Internet, why not?  It's almost like that board game, Clue.  Dad watches Breaking Bad, on the toilet, with his iPhone 10.  Mom watches No Reservations, in the kitchen, on the fridge.  Junior watches Fringe, in his room, while texting and listening to Radiohead and surfing the web simultaneously, on his iPad 9S.

Why not?  As long as he keeps Polly in there with him in the morning, so I can sleep in.

iOS 5 for Digital Marketers

Listen to this guy, he knows what he's talking about:
Rockfish Mobile Blog: IOS 5: 5 Features that Marketers Will Love

Decision-Making 101