rob’s blog

I was emailing with a friend of mine in an exchange over some travel plans and the coming holiday.  Normally, I block all advertisements in Firefox using Adblock, but I had whitelisted Gmail for some reason recently and so I was seeing the contextual advertising displayed on the right side of the web page.

Since I rarely see advertisements, I hardly ever investigate contextual advertising.  But given the sheer variety of products and services, I had to check out some of these:

• The Gold Cockerel Books company offers a chicken coop construction booklet at a mere $13.00.  Except they call it a “poultry house” which is surely a major step up for any fowl who grew up in a lowly coop.

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Neutrinos just wrapped its second iPhone application, it is a 20 questions trivia game called iQ.  It is great step from our first app, TipTotaler.  For iQ, I took on the user interface design for the application in addition to my normal website design and marketing.

The amount of graphic design and image handling in iPhone development is extensive and I’ve already blogged about a tool to assist in the 3d iPhone application icon design.  But the most interesting stuff is happening in Interface Builder and in xCode that I’m not supposed to talk about here.

Apple has an NDA up with all developers that they can not talk about their experience with the SDK.

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My friend Dave Peixotto is in charge of coding and software repository work on our iPhone application development.  I am in charge of the marketing and business aspects of our software company, Neutrinos, LLC.

One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app.  As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.

There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers:  First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57.  Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.

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Ryan Grim at The Politico wrote an article about the political leaks in Washington D.C. that also offers insight into how and why leaks happen just about everywhere, from bands to business to family secrets.

The article separates the types of leaks into three categories: the malevolent, the benevolent and the accidental.

Grim’s article includes eleven leak sub-categories each with a different intention. If you are plan to communicate with or be a part of the fourth estate, you should probably take a moment to read them each in detail. Instead of touching on each sub-category here, I would like to highlight how fair-weather leaks are used as a method of strategic media control.

Fair-Weather and Bad-Weather Patterns

“When an organization is being run well, people tend not to look at things as leaks, but they tend to look at things as information specifically being put out for some strategic purpose. When things are not well, the information getting out there is perceived as leaks.

-Chris Lehane, of the ‘92 Clinton campaign and later the White House.

This seems like a subjective impression to me, and I wonder how it could be quantified without defining exactly what it means for an organization to be “run well.” And Lehane’s idea seems to create a chicken-or-the-egg scenario: a well run organization incorporates strategy into leaks, while strategic leaks also seem to be the hallmark of a well run organization. Continue Reading »

I have a lot of catching up to do since moving to Boston but this is perhaps one of the most exciting and important things to happen in the music industry since Napster was released.

A Time article included a quote from an American producer that reads as follows:

That’s the interesting part of all this,” says a producer who works primarily with American rap artists. “Radiohead is the best band in the world; if you can pay whatever you want for music by the best band in the world, why would you pay $13 dollars or $.99 cents for music by somebody less talented? Once you open that door and start giving music away legally, I’m not sure there’s any going back.”

Via Green Plastic

I’ve explained my feelings in depth that Dave Matthews Band has the potential to do an independent release, but this seals the deal in my eyes. Dave Matthews loves Radiohead and York just created an artistic milestone DMB could only dream of taking part in at this point.

Baja Fresh was blowing up around the time I graduated from college. I had the one near my mom’s house in my phone for a while and I set up a number of dinners for pick up on the way home from my job. Then the quality of their food went south so I stopped going. Fast-forward to this past week when I see a billboard for a new Nacho Burrito at Baja Fresh.

I decided that I must have this new burrito. I finally got around to trying it out this afternoon, so here’s a quick review of the new offering from Baja Fresh.

First, you should know that Baja Fresh was bought by Wendy’s in 2002 for 245 million dollars. I graduated in 2003, so the timing makes sense given the hype around the company. However, in only a few years the business has become increasingly less valuable to the point where it was bought from Wendy’s for a song–David Kim of Anaheim, CA led a group of investors to buy Baja Fresh for only $31 million. Continue Reading »

I’ve been playing more and more nexus of technology and entertainment. I realized during my trip in Vegas that it is no longer okay to not have a business card to exchange. I printed these up using Avery’s 28877 Clean Edge business cards and Anne’s Deskjet 5160. Here’s the front (Some info obfuscated):

Just a quick post to advertise for Advertise For Peanuts. This site features creative advertising spots of a viral nature. This type of copy is the future of advertising as the 60 second commercial aimed at broadcasting gets fast-forwarded or deleted in the increasingly on-demand nature of content consumption.

Forcing users to watch commercials, i.e. prior to CNN’s online video news is an ugly way to get consumers attention. People will turn their speakers down or multi-task to avoid unwanted messaging. People will eat creative content alive whether it promotes Burger King or Hanes underwear so long as it makes them feel good.

As people will get better at filtering out broadcast advertising the videos and print offered on Advertising For Peanuts represent the marketers future for mainstream appeal.

There has been nothing short of an uproar regarding the recent changes to Tribe.net’s design and interface. Longtime users of the site began viral reactionary content creation which is making effective use of community building to voice discord with the direction of a website.

The changes were rolled out on January 18th and the response was violent “Tribe: New and Unimproved,” “Revert Tribe Now,” and “I Hate the New Tribe Look” sprang up and garnered members rather than the offically sanctioned comment tribe, “Tribe’s New Look.”

Many users of the site reacted by flaming the changes. The more interesting comments were those that voiced dissapointment in the change and commented that they felt especially wronged because of their personal investment or personal equity which they had invested.

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Yesterday, I received an unexpected stuffed envelope from Diesel Clothing. The return address was my local store in Portland, and it appeared someone had affixed the postage stamps by hand.

Inside was a nice box with a leather luggage tag and a series of postcards. The bag containing the postcards had a silver sticker designating the package as number 41 of 500 limited “copies.”
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