SensoryMetrics

Yep – my Halloween costume this year… my daughter liked it and my sons – it’s a balancing act…

What scary costumes have you seen tonight?

Is anyone dressing up as Vista???

A laptop battery???

Larry Ellison??

Sarah Palin??

Popularity: 16%

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Events, User Experience halloween, vista-is-scary

Your inner geek can finally meet your inner wino…

Apparently Portugal has laws that dictate whether you can call wine a “port” based on a geographic designation. This is similar to the Champagne region in France.

Peltier Station Winery created “USB” port to make a point. It’s not allowed to designate its product a port – so it uses the familiar USB icon to fill in the blank. (yes, of course it’s Californian!)

If this is successful, look out for copycat ports: 80, RS232, FireWire and Parallel won’t be far behind, although SCSI still has marketing challenges!

via The Dieline

Popularity: 17%

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Branding, Geek Wear peltier-station-winery, usb-port, Wine-labels

Forrester’s Consumer Forum 2008 is on right now in Dallas Texas, and they’ve just announced this year’s Groundswell social media winners.

We’re thrilled that our friend Gene DeRose, founder of House Party won top spot in the “Energizing” category. House Party partners with consumer product companies to sponsor simultaneous house parties. In this example for Hersheys, over 10,000 households held gatherings to try a new product called Bliss. Hersheys provides the loot bags, and the participants provide the comments, pictures, and videos!

Other Groundswell winners include:

Listening category: Mattel’s Playground Community – a social network for moms to discuss concerns about recalls and other topics.

Talking category: Young & Free Alberta – a social site geared towards banking and finance.

Supporting category: Nerd Network – a bunch of techies answer questions, solve mysteries, and mentor students.

Embracing category: My Starbucks Idea – How should Starbucks reinvent itself? It created a community to generate ideas.

Managing category: Border Workplace – Accenture created an internal social site to leverage the knowledge of its 100,000 consultants and staffers

Popularity: 19%

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Branding, Business, Events, Innovation, Media, User Experience, Web 3.0 forrester-research, Gene-deRose, groundswell-social-media, house-party

Genevieve Bell is Intel’s Director of User Experience. Her novel approach to UX comes from her background – she’s an anthropologist. Sort of a Margaret Mead for the internet.

On her ongoing university tour this month, she’s talking about how the internet is evolving from being a technological product to a social product. She offers six points:

1. The internet is “feral” and just like an alley cat, it’s on the move. This move to a feral internet changes people’s behavior away from what we come to expect from the desktop view.

2. Anglo-web prominence is vanishing. Bell states that the web is representing more languages – and it’s on the increase. This is an interesting point that counters the decimation of minor languages due to global commerce.

3. The wide range of upload and download speeds and infrastructure will create pockets of different behaviors and expectations.

4. Regulation of the internet will increase. Some jurisdiction will connect good citizenship with technology use. Others will will regulate to control and influence.

5. Since everyone lies on the internet, we will continue honing our skills crafting ourselves online.

6. Attitude of the internet has already shifted from fear of technology to aggressive self-presentation. Users are less likely to worry about privacy issues but rather how well they are portrayed.

So, how feral are you???

Popularity: 17%

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Innovation, Media, Mobility, User Experience, Web 3.0 genevieve-bell, intel-user-experience, internet-anthropology, next-internet

At today’s Embedded Systems Conference (who knew it was today?) Microsoft announced a terrific contest for designers for the Home of Future named Spark . The theme of the contest is an improved user experience. Embedded computing doesn’t seem that sexy these days so Microsoft is sweetening the prize pot with a $15,000. woooot!

The contest drags for for 5 months…

Microsoft also announced that

Their next generation of the Windows Embedded Standard edition, code named “Quebec” will be out in 2010 and will be based on Windows 7.

Quebec does seem a strange name for an embedded integration standard considering the Province of Quebec has flirted with separation from Canada for 30 years!

Popularity: 19%

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Branding, Events, Innovation, Software, Usability, User Experience, Web 3.0, Web Apps embedded-computing, quebec-edition, sparks-contest, windows-embedded-standard-edition

Here’s an ad campaign produced by Ogilvy & Mather Bangkok for Black & Decker. Yep – those American-made lawnmowers cut cleaner than a vanadium steel sushi knife. As an added bonus, your kids will get extra anatomy lessons every time you mow the lawn.

This is the kind of innovation we’ve come to expect from S. Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker, who in 1917 invented the portable electric drill. In 1979, they invented the Dustbuster, which helped us clean up those frog messes…

For those of you who like your frogs and snakes whole, don’t forget who the COLD-BLOODED ones are!!

via Coilhouse

Popularity: 20%

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Branding, Business, Environment, Innovation, Patents, Pirates black&decker, frog-beheading, lawnmowers, Thailand-advertising

I keep having to teach myself this lesson: sometimes choosing the discount product, you get less than what you pay for.

Here’s my can of “Star Snacks” cashews I bought on sale at Loeb’s supermarket… Notice the plump, golden cashews pictured on the outside… notice the evil-looking, shriveled, partly burnt, halloweenish cashews in the can. In fact the can wasn’t even full!

The label claims it’s USA-made, but the nuts are from “USA AND/OR ARGENTINA AND/OR MEXICO.” I can’t blame the distributor for not stating where they came from – I certainly wouldn’t own up to creating these failed nuts!

Out of the 3 possible countries of origin, none are in the top 10 cashew producing countries (which is led by Vietnam, India, and those nutty Brazilians.) So, maybe, the USA AND/OR ARGENTINA AND/OR MEXICO are still practicing growing them.

Star Snacks – a bad nut experience!.

Popularity: 16%

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Branding, Pirates, User Experience bad-nuts, discount-product, star-snack-cashews

GoogleJuice is the term website folks use to refer to Google’s methods of ranking websites.

According to a US study, the flurry of political sites has pushed official sites down in ranking so voters are having a hard time finding voting info. The Pew study finds that state election websites themselves have a low usability score of 58 percent across all 50 states.

Some of the study’s findings:

The average usability score for election Web sites in the 50 states and the District of Columbia is 58 percent—ranging from a high of 77 percent (Iowa) to a low of 33 percent (New Hampshire)

When using popular search engines such as Google, only 38 states appear as the first search term when searching for “voting in [STATE NAME]” and only 34 official state Web sites appear as the first search result when users enter in their state name with “polling place”

Thirty-four states have a poll locator tool, but only 11 states will identify a polling location for any address in the state—helping voters to easily find the basic information they will need to vote

Half the states including the District of Columbia (53 percent) offer a way for users to verify their registration online

By not improving their sites, states are missing an opportunity to save money on voter telephone help lines—up to $100 per call.

“Everything is well” rhymes with “Orwell”!

Popularity: 15%

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User Experience, Web 3.0 google-juice-us-election, US-election-user-experience

With this weekend’s success of Toronto’s Zombie Walk… Jobe & I got talking… Why not a StartUpZombie Walk? Branded Zombies!

Popularity: 18%

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Branding, Business, Events, Web 3.0 startup-zombie, zombie-camp, zombie-walk

The company Johnson Controls should ring a bell… they make thermostats, right? Yep. Old professor Warren S. Johnson founded the company in 1885. Lately, they’re pre-occupied with designing engaging and creative working environments for the next generation of workers.

Take the OXYGENZ survey here to influence what kind of cubes those Y2K babies will work in!

An interesting part of this survey is the focus on innovation and creativity. This is Johnson’s list of work space attributes that could contribute to innovation… what’s your top 3?

New Technology
Ambiance
Colors
People
Quality
Food
Culture
Meeting Spaces
Coffee & Drinks
Lighting
Private Spaces
Mobility
Scribble Tools
Socialized Environments
Others?

Popularity: 29%

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Environment, Innovation, Mobility, Patents, Software, Usability, User Experience, Web 3.0 innovation-spaces, johnson-controls, millennium-workers, workspaces