After three trade shows in 10 days (WebXpo 2010, Digital Signage expo Europe 2010 and Kiosk expo Europe 2010), the future is clear – 35% annual growth of the digital signage and self-service kiosk markets.
Let me introduce you to EXPOSE — the world’s first all-glass multi-touch kiosk with 25″ full-HD digital signage display and built-in surround sound system. Designed and manufactured by BrandTouch Europe, its less than one inch thick body integrates hundreds of hardware modules and software applications for your bank, boutique, hotel, trade show, event or residence.
With its ultimate HD multimedia, intelligent analytics, mobile CRM, hundreds of connectivity and application options, EXPOSE is the perfect ambassador for every brand, striving for top visibility and excellence.
Every third import in the united European market is suspicious counterfeiting with infringed brand or design rights. The global loss is $30-50m just for one brand and billions per year for the top 5 cosmetic brands, mostly in less developed markets. Seems when your brand is 120 years old and you sell in 210 countries, you have an attractive critical mass to be attacked by counterfeiters, even if your licensee produces the goods in the same Chinese factory where the fake products come from.
What would you do? You develop a brand integrity strategy, you invent optical quality packaging, laser-focused quality control, nanocoatings, sophisticated visible/ invisible color shifting labels, individual 2D barcode tagging, transparent packaging, licensed factories and exclusive authorized distributors. You constantly secure, enhance, deter, partner and do brand ID trainings of law attorneys, National Customs Agency officers, The Border Police, NSCOC (National Service for Combating Organized Crime) agents.
Sofia is a part of a worldwide network of administrative and brand integrity investigators and I was happy to see so many fake website knock-downs, seizes, raids and litigation programs. With more than 75 000 annual counterfeiting cases for Europe only, you can be sure that buying a fake Estee Lauder perfume, full of sulfur, ammonia, phosphorus, potassium, titanium and horse/dogs urine as a binder to keep the alcohol and oils, will not be the best bargain to make you girlfriend happy, especially if you don’t wanna see her face and skin burned tomorrow. It’s not only a brand protection or tax/unemployment protection issue; it’s your own health and consciousness.
Tablet PCs have been a huge trend in the last decade and especially at CES 2010. As noted by Deloitte: computer manufacturers are predicted to sell millions of “NetTabs” worldwide, a market of 612 million GBP. By 2015, shipments are forecast to reach about 57 million units annually.
Microsoft announced the Tablet PC concept 10 years ago and once I got my first Acer C300 (convertible Tablet PC) in 2003, I never moved back to “laptops”.
I decided on a TabletPC because I didn’t want to be chained to my desk at the office/home when you can design and sketch digitally everywhere – on the plane, on the beach, in the mountains, in the café – sketching your ideas, stories and the life that surrounds you….only a TabletPC can give you that freedom and experience. This devices are the perfect match for creative professionals – a digital sketchbook where you can do everything we used to do in our studio + much more – getting notes and digitizing content, sketching logos and websites, painting with thousands of brushes and canvas types, sculpting and rendering 3D models with endless choice of materials and lights, designing business presentations, CNC toolpath, SWOT/ web analytics/ SEO reports for customers and of course the casuals – web surfing, video conferences and Skype calls, music, emails, eBook reading, office apps - all of this on the move, out of the office, on the fly – wherever you want to go. Once I grabbed a tablet PC, I never looked back (currently spending less than 3 hours per week at the office). Designers love to use simple things like stylus (pen one end, eraser on the other) or fingertips in 90% of the cases, using a PC as natural as possible.
The first major UMPC improvement came last year with Dell Latitude XT2 and HP TouchSmart tx2, packing a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo behind a 12.1” multitouch screen, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB disk, secured with a fingerprint scanner, which I enjoy every day. The only drawback is that the 256 pressure-sensitivity works only in a couple of applications, while Wacom Intuos4 has 2048 pixel-level pressure sensitivity, with several different brushes and even detects at which angle you hold the stylus to the surface.
After Apple joined the “tablet” party with it’s iPad this month (a pen coming soon), the slate PC market will grow exponentially, but the creative professionals are (almost) forgotten. The NetTabs are only larger media-focused readers/ phones, so I have to use my old convertible C300. After Acer discontinued all their tablet PC recently, I’m still searching for the ultimate tool for creative professionals:
Large Screen – 12.1” SXGA is my favorite and it really does matter. The larger the device, the more useful it is, as far as you can carry it in a standard office bag.
Wi-Fi, 3G/UMTS – I can leave with a Wi-Fi + Bluetooth connectivity , a tablet is not a second phone plus you can always speak in speakerphone mode. Data plans will come down when 4G is spread in 2013
Rigid design and Battery Life – you can choose from 2 to 10 hours. Just cut in half what the vendor says or get a second battery to secure your new customer while making your great presentation.
eBook Reading – while electronic paper is still the best display type for reading if you read a lot, but we need a devices that work well for both books and multimedia, artists don’t think in black and white.
Win 7/ i7 applications – content is critical, applications are critical. We need a working tool to make us $$$ per hour, not a plastic toy. Multitasking? Intel does, iPad doesn’t.Games, TV and videos are different story for other devices.
Pens, Brushes, Rugged, Waterproof… – sometimes a feature makes the device. If you want to use it outdoors, in the rain or charge it in the car? Get a Motion computing tablet
Price? $500 to $5000. My first generation Acer was very expensive, this year we’ll have a convertible for less than $500!
Toshiba Portégé M750 and Fujitsu Lifebook T4310 are nice office tablets, Motion J3400 and Duros 8404 are great rugged tablets with the best outdoor display on the market, iPad and Pegatron are nice entertainment media tablets, but I can’t see the ultimate device for creative professionals. Rather than buying a dust-collector, I will wait until the end of the year, hoping to see the best tablet PC. Lenovo U1 Hybrid is really close to the perfect one!
What’s your tablet PC experience?
Tablet PCs have been a huge trend in the last decade and especially at CES 2010.As noted by Deloitte: computer manufacturers are predicted to sell tens of millions of “NetTabs”worldwide, a market of 612 million GBP.By 2015, shipments are forecast to reach about 57 million annually.Microsoft announced the Tablet PC concept 10 years ago and once I got my first Acer C300 (convertible Tablet PC) in 2003, I never moved back to “laptops”.
I decided on a TabletPC because I didn’t wantto be chained to my desk at the office/home when you can design and sketch digitally everywhere– on the plane, on the beach, in the mountains, in the café – sketching your ideas, stories and the life that surrounds you….only a TabletPC can give you that freedom and experience.This devices are the perfect match for creative professionals – a digital sketchbook where you can do everything we used to do in our artist studio + much more – getting notes and digitizing content, sketching logos and websites, painting with thousands of brushes and canvas types, sculpting and rendering 3D models with endless choice of materials and lights, designing business presentations, CNC toolpath, SWOT/ web analytics/ SEO reports for customers and of course the casuals – web surfing, video conferences and Skype calls, music, emails, eBook reading, office apps - all of this on the move, out of the office, on the fly – wherever you want to go. Once I grabbed a tablet PC, I never looked back. Designers love to use simple things like stylus (pen one end, eraser on the other) or fingertips in 90% of the cases, using a PC as natural as possible.
The only major UMPC improvement came last year with the HP tx2 tablet, packing a 1.3GHz Core 2 Duo behind a 12.2”multitouch screen, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB disk, secured with a fingerprint scanner, which I enjoy every day. The only drawback is that the 256 pressure-sensitivity works only in a couple of applications, while a Wacom Intuos4 has 2048 pixel-level pressure sensitivity, with several different brushesand even detects at which angle you hold the stylus to the surface.
After Apple joined the “tablet” party with it’s iPad this month (a pen coming soon), the slate PC market will grow exponentially, but the creative professionals are (almost) forgotten. The NetTabs are only larger media-focused readers/ phones, so I have to use my old convertible C300. After Acer discontinued all their tablet PC recently, I’m still searching for the ultimate tool for creative professionals:
·Large Screen – 12.1” SXGAis my favorite and it really does matter. The larger the device, the more useful it is, as far as you can carry it in a standard office bag.
·Wi-Fi, 3G/UMTS– I can leave with a Wi-Fi + Bluetooth connectivity , a tablet is not a second phone plus you can always speak in speakerphone mode.Data planswill come down when 4G is spread in 2013
·Rigid design and BatteryLife– you can choose from 2 to 10 hours. Just cut in half what the vendor says or get a second battery to secure your new customer while making your great presentation.
·eBook Reading– while electronic paper is still the best display type for reading if you read a lot, but we need a devices that work well for both books and multimedia, artists don’t think in black and white.
·Win 7/ i7 applications- content is critical, applications are critical. We need a working tool to make us $$$ per hour, not a plastic toy. Multitasking? Intel does, iPad doesn’t.Games, TV and videos are different story for other devices.
·Pens, Brushes, Rigid, Waterproof? – sometimes a feature makes the device.
If you want to use it outdoors, in the rain or charge it in the car? Get a Motion computing tablet
·Price – $500– $5000?. My first generation Acer was very expensive, this year we’ll have a convertible for less than $500!
Toshiba Portégé M750 and Fujitsu Lifebook T4310 are nice office tablets,Motion J3400 and Duros are rugged tablets with the best outdoor display on the market, iPad and Pegatron are nice entertainment media tablets, but I can’t see the ultimate device for creative professionals. Rather than buyinga dust-collector, I will wait until the end of the year, hoping to see the best tablet PC in 2010.
Lenovo U1 Hybrid is really close to the perfect one!
When you ask your friends if they have created a life strategy for the next week, month, year, five or even ten years – over 90% will answer No! or should I?
Yes, we should. Some of us create to-do lists, (I prefer to make not-to-do lists), other are permanently writing “business-in-recession” strategies, but do we share our life strategies? Rarely. Are you interested to prepare a life strategy, If you knew how to?
We share those mumble-grumble social network status updates that “it was a great weekend, but now it’s Monday again and I have to wait 340 more days for my next vacation“… but there is no time to think and commit to paper?
Most of my friends from the past have only shorter life horizons because it is difficult to them to look far into the future and predict an outcome.
We didn’t learned why it’s important to create a life strategy at school. It was only “I want it all and I want it now”, or “I’ll be happy if I can afford a beer tomorrow” Carpe Diem, live in the moment – spontaneous, natural and keep rolling?
Well my friends, I don’t agree. Well-being is the way you want it to be. We should be open to all possibilities and not overlook new opportunities, but how you will know WHAT’s a new opportunity if you don’t know where you are going?
A life without a strategy is like a ship without a target and reason. Your canoe will definitely sail you somewhere, but where you end up may not be where you really want to go. Or the most important part is to live every moment as though the whole world were watching?
Life strategy is not about a boxed career, income, buying a house, getting married, having kids or being a self-reliance, financial self-sufficient entrepreneur, retired as multi-millionaire at 60. It’s about the big idea, HOW to achieve the desired level of freedom, relationships, income, business, emotional and spiritual intelligence, etc.
I’m happy that most of my current friends and contacts have a life strategy, they can share it with a Tim Ferris’ DreamLine or Richard Koch’s ActionPlan in 10 minutes and that we can compare our progress, meet for monthly happiness plan brainstorms and and we can shorten the horizon to our goals together.
Do I have one, yes, I wrote one, called Clouds (abstract, but solid foundation of clear life-goals) when I was 15-17 and it’s continually tuned every day, with every new knowledge and experience, tweaked for perfect outcome. Clearly, developing and sharing a life strategy makes a lot of sense and can be useful to all of us, which want to find something to be happy about.
Why? Because we can feel unlimited where we stand, to know that anything that we desire can be ours, that we are eager and full of life, free and fun and easy. Let’s challange our perception of personal limits and don’t let our dreams stay dreams.
Here are 10 highlights from my mid-2009 life strategy update:
In the second half of 2009 I will:
Move from doing most of the things to what I do best and let others do the rest. (I can’t be expert on 80 things, just on 20
Leap-frog my top5 direct competitors in the next 6 months, building and top positioning global brands with higher quality at 70% of the price.
Increase the quality and reduce the quantity of my relationships and friend-lists by at least 30% for 6 months.
Decrease compromising my integrity for anything or anybody to 10%.
Decrease the communication and social noice by 60% more in 3 months.
Say NO politely but immediately 20% more often.
Stop expending energy on peripheral issues that cannot yield a payoff no matter the outcome.
I’ll use pure strenghts and truth instead of trying to make true that which I love or I am weak at.
Use free will and energy to go ahead and uphill, day after day
Stop wasting time talking about my plans to others. Give you only 2 minutes to say what you have to say quickly and simply – then we probably stop talk/ chat? Zipping the lip.
We have all the time on this planet, but without Destination, Route and Actions, we are going nowhere. Success is our own damn fault. So work less, succeed more, enjoy more, be more strategy-focused, less tactic-focused, and let me know what you think.
The Revolution starts on 1st of July. You are Vellycomed to join.
Wow, thank you very much for the great interest and the 340 CVs in our last top talent recruitment HR folder, but I should be clear here – we will pick only professional web marketers, who can backup their claims with observable results on the web – case studies, high-quality content, solved problems, top-ranked websites or reputable service.
Glad that you want to start a new hobby, a new digital branding career, but if you start at ground zero, there is a great chance to fail. Despite your skills and background, you will be overwhelmed with paralyzing volumes of information and digital marketing courses. Even following our blueprint, your lack of digital marketing basics will eat your time and focus.
Sure, persistence, good communication and writing style are one of the most important skills, but consulting and building successful online businesses is not equal to blasting emails, answering phone-calls and organizing cocktails. How about video, presentation or web analytics skills?
It takes years before one knows how to build successful online businesses. We just don’t have the time to spend months learning how all this works and you have bills to pay, right? Same here. Building a solid brand, successful online business or global top rankings in Google takes months and years. We look for this experience in every team-member and partner.
If you still believe you are the one, even overqualified! one, or you are an overnight-web-success-exception to all above (yes, we got few ones), please give us a call. Thank you again and hope to see you at the top!
These days I get trend alerts for services and products with over 520% price deviation! (my last booked fare moved from $650 to $3420 and back to $870 in just 2 months).
Today we can track service prices and scan product barcodes at the store, choosing the perfect time and source to get what we are looking for. Awesome, isn’t it? Same product, same quality, 526% price amplitude ? Welcome to 2009!
Name it as you want it – crisis, shaking demand or branding wars…
Do you remember your first 1MB SIMM memory, which you got for $100? Yeah, it was around 1992.
A new PC for €100
Yesterday, while asking a friend supplier for a small web server component, I found a mini treasure with the new dual core Intel Atom onboard.
Interested in what Intel D945GCLF2 is capable of, I got one and it turned inmy first PC under 100 euro!
It’s much faster than we need it for the new on-demand web service processing box.
97 euros dealer's pack
Well, I agree that most of you will need a full-featured netbook with financial analysis processing power, but that’s not the current case (although you get 14.8 score for Business Winstone) and 5x faster MP3 and video encoding!
Others may say that it’s a bulk recession-friendly piece of hardware, but actually it’s more than most of us currently use in our daily work:
1 x Soldered Dual Core Intel Atom 1.6GHz 45nm processor
1GB DDR2 up to 2GB
Intel 945GC chipset: 82945GC on the Northbridge, 82801GB ICH7 on the Southbridge
GMA 950 integrated graphics
S-Video output with HDTV encoder
RealTek ALC662 codec with HDA and 6 channel audio
SPDIFF header on motherboard
1x PCI slot, 8 USB2.0 ports, 1 x IDE, 2 x SATA2,
1 x VGA, 1 LPT, 1 RS232, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
Rapid BIOS boot, Express BIOS Update
10/100/1000Gigabit Ethernet, wake on USB, PCI, PS/2, Lan
Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows XP Home and Pro, 32/64 bit support
…although my new industrial friend boots Linux from a USB flash…
the IOs
All of that on a 17×17x3cm board with a maximum total power draw of 8W! Let’s see how it will perform in the web services controller.
Wow, that was a sunny and eco-friendly Sunday! Cheers and see you at the Room full for Mirrors movie tonight
The choice is yours. Wherever you land on the planet today, you pay for what you get.
We are in the brand performance management business. It’s not cheap and it’s not for every business. But it’s worth. Some just look for dirty cheap “hosting”, they google for ‘free’, ‘cheap’ and ‘discounted’, next month they look for even more cheaper. Customers? No, thanks. Popular doesn’t mean valuable, it means inferiority complex and big headache.
Hosting providers such as BlueHost (and most others for that matter) have a particular target market in mind for the services they provide. If the type of website your company has fits their target market, then you will rarely have any problems with their service. Maybe. If you don’t host your brand with 740 blacklisted link farms and adult websites on the same IP. If you don’t rush the shared server’s CPU to manage or archive your database. If…
If the type of website you have doesn’t fit their target market then you will have problems. Lots of them, on a daily basis. BlueHost give people the opportunity to find out if your site fits their target market by offering to refund your money if you are not happy after the first month. You can get all your “money” back and move elsewhere, month after month. Year after year. Someday you will even find free hosting, full of big-breasted banners, which will please the eye of your customers, for free.
If several hundred commodity static websites can share one server without overloading the server’s CPU, then it is much cheaper for your website to host on a server that places several hundred sites, than it would be to host it on a dedicated server that only hosts a dozen or so sites in order to make available a much higher CPU usage that the static sites don’t need, but a dynamic website that gets and serves thousands visitors and customers per day, executing millions service, sales and support transactions in real-time and doesn’t cache pages – it definitely would need.
If you have a supercharged V12 engine, then you don’t buy a small car and expect the engine to fit, you’d buy a large car or SUV that has space for a large engine. You can’t reach the top with a Micra or Golf, or even VW Country. You drive a Land Rover. Or LandCruiser. Or PathFinder.
The same applies to websites and hosting as applies to engines and cars. You need to choose an advantage environment, which supplies the resources that your website AND BRAND requires and if you need more than minimal CPU for your website to run you need to buy more expensive hosting that puts fewer sites on each server so that the required CPU is available. And most of all you need rock-solid, fanatic, real-time support.
However, the server CPU performance is just one of thousands Brand Performance metrics, which you have to master and monitor. But it’s very important, as well as other mission-critical factors like:
Brand Architecture and Strategy
Business Process Reengineering and Change Management
Web 2.0 strategy
CRM, Website & Database Performance
Business Intelligence dashboarding
Search Engine Optimized and Friendly, usable website
Google top5 presence
Competitive Intelligence and web analytics metrics
Conversion rate (CR), Customer value (RFM, LTV)
Performance management
Whoops, ten years ago we were happy with 100 visits and 10 bookmarks of our website daily. Shift happens.
It’s snowing today! Let’s grab the ski tomorrow. See ya at the top!
Yours BrandMover
Spending your time away from home for 1/3 of the year definitely broadens your horizon and presents lots of opportunities to meet great people, exploring new cultures and outdoor activities in the real world (it’s getting too virtual lately, isn’t it?).
While in 2007 I spent less than 100 days on the road, 2008 was pretty active with 120+ days abroad (Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Greece and the USA, to mention some of the destinations.) I will try to keep the trend for 2009 with more business and exploration trips – mostly between February and July – from SES to Northern Ireland to Everest base camp.
All of this could be easily tracked with Travel 2.0 web services like Dopplr and TripIt. You can forward your booking confirmations to plan@tripit.com and automatically sync your iCal with a feed, that has useful info. You get notifications when you will be in the same city as your friends, controling who can see your trips and collaborate on them.
The Dopplr annual reportis real fun and almost real picture of your trips, especially if they are linked with flickr.
Dopplr report
” You took 15 trips in 2008, which added up to 14,134 km or 3% of the distance to the moon. Everyone on Dopplr travelled a total of 1331.4 million km in 2008: the approximate distance to Saturn from the Earth as of January 2009. Your personal velocity for 2008 was 1.61 km/h, which is about the same as NASA’s crawler. The 5 most popular cities in your network are Stockholm, Lisbon, Zürich, Cairns and Brussels. We couldn’t calculate the carbon footprint of your travels for 2008 because at the moment, you’re not using that feature. In 2008, the average carbon of those who are tracking the impact of their travels on Dopplr was 6,413 kg CO2.”
After a deep research for my smart tools upgrade, Santa brought me a new smartphone, camera, monitor and MIDI controller.
They all share a common trend for 2009: slim and stylish design, hundreds of consolidated features, precise touch control and web-native applications.
…but you may end your holiday with HTC’s Touch Pro, like I did.
All you need – wherever you are.
Digital Camera
Canon PowerShot SX1
Recently gone through some hunting, I decided to compare Canon EOS 450D with the new Powershot SX1. The pictures from the dSLR were comparable to the ones by the SX1, which is a great hybrid – crisp macro and enormous telephoto zoom in a one-hand package was a perfect fit.
If you wanna get rid of your old and heavy SLR, Canon SX1 is empowered with features never seen before on a compact camera:
20x wide-angle optical zoom
10 Megapixel CMOS
new DIGIC 4 processor for fast performance
4 fps continuous shooting and
full HD movie capture!
2009 will be the year of the rich, detailed, crisp full HD images in a wide ISO range of shooting situations with full manual control on the move.
All-in-one LCD Monitor
Samsung T260HD
I was tired of messing with 3 screens in the studio, so an upgrade to a full HD, crystal clear LCD monitor with integrated DTV tuner was a perfect fit.
The Samsung T260HD is a 26″ Widescreen full HD+ (1920×1200) resolution with embedded DTV tuner, 10000:1 dynamic contrast, 2 invisible built-in SRS TruSurround speakers and 5ms grey-to-grey response time.
The viewing angle in both axis is over 160 degrees, so I can follow what’s is going on literally from everywhere, even from the bent glass bathtub. Finally all video cables go to the same unit – Analog RGB, DVI, HDMI, Component, and TV. The only problem I had was, that there is no VESA wall mount, so I had to mount it on a wall TV swivel/ tilt stand.
MIDI controller/ Stage piano
KAWAI mp5
8 years later I’m happy to get back to daily jam sessions with hundreds of native sampled instruments, played on an advanced hammer action professional stage piano. After testing CME VX8 and Yamaha Motif XS8, I decided to stick to KAWAI and their 80 years of piano sound experience. The new KAWAI MP5 is sure to satisfy the most demanding performer’s need for impeccable sound quality, responsive touch, 4 zones and powerful control. Not to mention using it as master 88-key MIDI controller in your home-based studio. Boasted with 256 high-quality instrument sounds, including Kawai’s famous Concert Grand piano, the sound is awesome! Hope to find a KAWAI K1 library, which was my favorite 12 years ago.
Tablet PCs have been a huge trend in the last decade and especially at CES 2010. As noted by Deloitte: computer manufacturers are predicted to sell millions of “NetTabs” worldwide, a market of 612 million GBP. By 2015, shipments are forecast to reach about 57 million units annually.
When you ask your friends if they have created a life strategy for the next week, month, year, five or even ten years – over 90% will answer No! or should I?
