Marketing

Meet 'Eneloopy', Sanyo's cute canine battery checker! Eneloopy's LED nose lights up in a range of colors corresponding to how much power is left in your batteries. Bow, er, wow!

With the heightened buying frenzy surrounding the launch of Google's new smartphone, the Droid, it was no surprise that someone would piggyback off of the hype! While Google conducts its first-time TV advertising, Flipswap, a trade-in service aggressively jumped into the foray with a unique offer to swap cash for your old 'clunky' iPhones. ( Where was the Administration on this one?)

When you've got the mother of all headaches, you want relief and you want it NOW. Bufferin Plus S has been specially formulated to dissolve twice as fast as ordinary pills, thus delivering its four active ingredients to the bloodstream quicker than you can say "not tonight, honey".

The Internet of Things is fast approaching and with it comes Web 3.0, where "social awareness" will replace "social networking." Soon tweets and status updates will become fully automated and generated by the world around us versus us ever having to touch a keyboard again.

Nintendo just can't enough of a good thing and either can buyers of its popular DS-series portable gaming consoles. The answer, in the form of the big-screen DSi LL, arrives in Japan this November 21 but Americans will have to wait until 2010.

November 5: Twitter rolls out Project Retweet to a limited audience. According to their recent blog post, the Twitter echelon wants to see how it  will "work in the wild," before offering it up to the Twitterverse.

Your photos are in color, so why not your camera? That's the question Pentax is about to answer with their new K-x DSLR cameras, available in a rainbow of shades including a limited edition version sporting Robotic Colors.

Many have tried, but it's been over a decade and none have succeeded in out-Googlin' Google. Yet here we go again, with yet another search engine entering stage right trying to capture our "attention-deficit" attention. Repackaging online search as something new infers the Web has evolved. And while real-time and social search have certainly changed the alchemy of search, what does Leapfish know that has eluded Google et al?

While branding oneself takes time and effort to spin out a new product, re-branding can take several washes to redefine that same brand. Take for example the work United Airlines had to accomplish after breaking someone's guitar. Let alone the number of Twitter apologies issued forth by Chris Brown and Kanye West. But when others do it in reverse and run their good-guy image through a darkside wash cycle, the task might be a little easier. Such is the case with the re-engineering of one Mickey Mouse.

Did the "voice of jihad" just get a little louder? Afghan tribalism has origins that date back 1400 years to the early Muslim and Islamic civilizations. With a lifestyle based on jihad and an economy that thrives on opium trade, who would have thought that these warring factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan would ever embrace social media as a means to communicate.

Wisk laundry detergent just launched a new facebook app called WISK-IT that extends their powerful cleaning heritiage into the world of social media. Designed to make it easy to find and remove all those photos on facebook that might be embarrasing, and a general "stain" on your reputation, this is one of those apps that isn't just functional but a great marketing idea. Conceived and developed by TracyLocke, an integrated marketing agency, the WISK-IT app reminds you that "Everyone's got a photo that needs to be washed away."

The health care reform debate this current legislative season has been more about who could shout the loudest versus who really had something to say. Earning their label as the "Party of No" the GOP's push back on health care has been perceived as protest-for-protest sake.

For wordsmiths the world over, a rejection notice is the common denominator shared by the entire literary community whether you are the next Hemingway or a weekend poet. However unwelcoming, those "we regret to inform you" letters have become a right of passage for writers. On the flip side, all an author really wants to see is his or her words in print. To that end Fictionaut, an online social network for fiction writers addresses that need.

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch wrote a very insightful article titled "Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell," exposing Zynga and its scam-laden lead gen-type offers devised for their ever-popular Facebook games of Farmville and Mafia Wars. I challenge one of the more ethical game developers to actually use Arrington's expose to develop the real thing - an actual Facebook game called "ScamVille!"

Art, maps,imagery and graphs add context and a visual component to numbers, locations, and information. With as much influx of data we contend with on a daily basis, visualization tools allows our brains to take a rest while perceiving content in a different light. In essence, visualization allows us to stop and smell the pixels, in spite of the fact we might learn a few things along the way.

They're baaaaaack....  It seems that there truly is a never-ending stream of bizarre ad campaigns out there that are designed to shock and/or repulse the consumer for product attention.  If you've enjoyed my previous forays into this topic, you'll not be disappointed...

With the Holiday Season fast approaching, you might want to consider "making your list and checking it twice."Lists are the new order of business in Twitterville. Some say it will take the place of "Follow Fridays." Others think its jumping on the the Google Wave and Enterprise Microblogs' bandwagon.

This year in addition to influences from the movie industry's horror flicks, the financial decline in the US appears to be just as scary, if not more horrifying than "Paranormal Activity" and "Saw 2,3,4,5,etc." Let's take a look at how our current financial crisis might be affecting "All Hallows Eve" this year!

For those familiar with the TV Show "Survivor," one knows you have to "outwit, outplay and outlast." And while that same philosophy is sometimes jokingly applied to failing marriages, LousySpouse.com's slogan of "endure, survive and prevail" plays it a little closer to the vest. Yes, there is a social network for those in the thralls of divorce, whether it be pre-, post or during.

Ubiquitous Google is out there once again speeding past anything it finds in its way on what we use to call the Superhighway! This time its taken to the gadget world by transforming their Android phones into mobile GPS navigation systems - and its free!