January 2009
35 posts
Three books I just finished reading and some text I’ve written about them. Read the text or skip my text and read the books right away instead.
1. Buyology
by Martin Lindstrom (2008)
This book is about neuromarketing – what happens inside your head when you are exposed to marketing and when you buy stuff. The book explains what Lindstrom (he’s Danish!) and his team discovered during a three year research project involving fMRI (brain scan) and EEG technologies. The results are in many ways controversial. A few examples of what they found was the cigarette health warnings actually stimulate smoking, that product placement almost never work, that strong brands from a brain activity perspective and that Nokia’s well-known ring tone destroys the brand. Overall, this book is a must-read for anyone into progressive marketing.
I give it four myselves out of five.
2. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini (2008)
This book is a summary of recent social-psychological research on persuasion. The book highlights 50 pretty simple (but effective) strategies to convince people. The book looks at persuasion mainly from a marketing perspective, but many of the ideas could be applied to everyday life situations as well. The scenarios in the book are very concrete – one for instance describes how to alter the messages on cards left in hotel rooms that asks you to recycle your towel, to maximize the number of people who behaved in environmentally friendly ways (the key here by the way, is to tell the guests that most past guests in the hotel, or even the guests of the very room you are staying in already are recycling). All scenarios are scientifically proven and are presented with statistics. This book is also very well worth reading. A plus for one of the guys who wrote it’s name is Steve Martin.
Four myselves out of five.
3. Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
by Sarah Lacy (2008)
This book, written by business reporter Sarah Lacy (BusinessWeek), takes you behind the scenes of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. In the book Lacy profiles Max Levchin (Slide’s founder), Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson (digg.com) and Mark Zuckerberg (The founder of Facebook). This book tells (sometimes) really interesting stories about the people and their journeys, far from the boring management literature you usually find on the topic.
Three and a half myselves out of five.
Bigspaceship just launched Prettyloaded:
“Once upon a time, in a land of sputtering dial-up connections, websites took ages to load. Folks yearned for the 100% mark. But as soon as that figure arrived, the beloved (or bemoaned) preloader disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. Until now.
Pretty Loaded is an archive of preloaders that preload other preloaders…which in turn reveal yet more preloaders. Copy that? It’s a tribute to a vanishing art form amid a constantly changing digital landscape.
This infinite loader is being put together with help from friends across the interactive community. We’ll continue to add to it over time, so keep on coming back.”
After playing around with Windows 7 for half a day, here are my first impressions.
- It’s better than Windows Vista
- It’s still extremely ugly
- It’s still extremely annoying
If I were Microsoft I would ask CP+B (or us?) for some help with the actual product instead of designing street wear.
More detailed review coming up.
The only I’ve got so far is this image:
More from CES, here a an $80 game you control with your brain from Mattel.
Read more here
Palm just launched their Palm Pre, the smartphone one billion of us have been waiting for, especially me being a former Treo junkie. This is an iPhone, Android and Palm race now. The Palm Pre sports a 3.1” touchscreen, a slide-out keyboard, and it runs Palm’s new WebOS platform (dubbed Palm WebOS – pretty creative). I haven’t yet understood how deeply the WebOS platform is implemented, but at least it’s like what Apple tried doing with the iPhone with their web apps (but failed). And hopefully it’s even more – like a true WebOS (i.e. Cloudo I’m working on). Clear is that anyone who knows CSS, HTML and XML can develop apps, and that it features a new system called Synergy that automatically syncs your contacts across Facebook, Google and Outlook. You also get consolidated IM from multiple services. Another first is the wireless charger - a definite first in a mainstream phone. The phone will be launched for Spring in the first half of 2009, and apparently there is a 3g version in the making for those of us in Europe.
It’s seems like it’s time for the concept of WebOS to go mainstream pretty soon – Apple’s iWork.com earlier this week and now this.
P.e.p.p.
Read more at engadget.
A full ecosystem.
1. Pickeled herring (sill)
2. Smoked guillemot (sillgrissla). Main diet: herring
3. Fermented Greenland or Basking shark (grönlandshaj / brugd). Main diet: fish and large sea birds (such as the guillemot) / plankton.
4. Lobster (hummer). Main diet. Dead sea-living animals (such as shark).
(Dessert: Skyr)
Dancing manias:
Like the first one in Aachen, Germany in 1374 or the one in Strasbourg in 1518.
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The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962
Was an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness (MPI) rumored to have occurred in the vicinity of the village ofKashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in the modern nation of Tanzania near the border of Kenya. At the start of the incident, a joke was told in a boarding school, and that this joke triggered a small group of students to start laughing. The laughter perpetuated itself, far transcending its original cause.
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South Korean Fan Death:
Fan death is a South Korean urban legend which states that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can cause the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside. Fans manufactured and sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on.
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Genital Retraction Syndrome (GRS):
Generally considered a culture-specific syndrome, is a condition in which an individual is overcome with the belief that his/her external genitals—or also, in females, breasts—are retracting into the body, shrinking, or in some male cases, may be imminently removed or disappear.
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Here’s some info on the Monkeyman that haunted New Dehli a couple of years ago. Apparantely he (she?) went to Russia, and hasn’t been spotted since.
“The news website Ananova reported in June 2001 that the Monkey Man was last seen boarding an Aeroflot flight to Moscow (“Monkey Man reappears on Moscow-bound flight”). The story was also carried by the Russian newspaper Pravda (“Monkey Man Attacks Russian Airliner”).”
Read more on here.
